Blog Book/StoryBook

My favorite truck stopped by my house yesterday. I love the UPS man. Who's not happy to see the UPS man/woman? They bring presents, never bills.

Yesterday he brought me this.

It's my Blog Book/Family Album that I finished last week.

Here's the cover. Isn't it pretty? I'm so excited!

Originally the plan was to slurp my blog on Blurb, but they no longer slurp Blogger blogs. Bummer.

However, my resourceful friend, Janet, has managed to copy and paste her Blogger blog into a Blurb book and is on the verge of ordering it. I asked her about the process, and she said that she was very happy with the number of templates available for her to use. And even if she could have slurped her blog, she probably would have been moving things around anyway because she wanted her captions to stay with their respective pictures. And she was able to do that in Blurb.

It's all about control. My friend.

So, I'm anxious to see her book once she gets it.

I went another route though. I ended up copying and pasting my blog into my Creative Memories StoryBook Creator Plus program and turning it into a 12x12 StoryBook.

Somewhere in the whole exhausting process, I decided to include my digi scrap layouts in their respective chronological order amongst my blog posts, and a huge mountain of responsibility lifted from my shoulders.

You see, I rationalized, if I've included some of my family pictures in a blog post already, I don't have to digi scrap said photos as well. Ding! I just killed two birds with one stone.

The only time I included the post with a digi scrap layout of the same pics was when I wanted to keep the story from the blog post with the pictures. I'm not always very good at including the entire story with my digi scrap layouts because that leaves less room for embellishments. Pretties.

I'm very happy with the result. I kept the blog post pages very simple and white, and just copied and plunked my posts right into the book. With StoryBook Creator Plus, I not only had complete control over the placement of my pictures, but control over the number and size of pictures on a page. Ditto with the font choice, size, color and drop shadow.

I could have put pretty paper for a background, but I didn't even want to open that can of worms. I wanted to get it done fast.

I'm very happy with the digi scrap layouts. They came out vibrant and gorgeous.

This book is going to fit nicely on my bookshelf. It will take up much less room than a scrapbook album for the same time period. I love that.

But, since I'm not the type to simply blow sunshine, here are the negatives.

1) The maximum number of pages that can go into a Creative Memories Storybook is 100, which is really 50 actual pages, 100 only if you're counting the front and back of the pages. For me, since I'm such a wind bag, that meant that my book includes only January through September of 2008 instead of the entire year as I would have liked.

2) You need a software program to be able to do this. You could do it with the StoryBook Creator Plus program and order the book from the Creative Memories Photo Center, or you could do it in PhotoShop Elements or some other digi scrap program and order it from Shutterfly.

3) My book, with shipping and sales tax included, was $261.35. I know! You think you're surprised, I'm still recovering from my heart palpitations.

However, I'm good at rationalizing when it suits me, and I know I would have spent more money and time trying to put all this into a scrapbook album at home, and it would have taken up much more space. I'm so happy with the results that I'm not even going to complain about the cost. And its ensuing financial crisis.

Did I mention that denial is my friend too?