2011 Photo Book

I've had a lot of time on my hands with a baby sleeping in my lap lately.  And less brainpower than it takes to draw (until recently, as you might have noticed.  We are starting to get some sleep!  Yay!).  Thus, I have been working on photobooks.  Because I decided not to journal and have been reusing templates from previous projects, these books are taking less than a week of naps each.  I finished 2011, 2009 and two vacation books.  Can't afford to get them all printed at once, however.  

I started with our 2011 book.  I designed it with the Creative Memories software (which I am still full of love for) and printed it through Picaboo (because they are cheaper).  

Here is the front cover (very inspired by Paislee Press, she is so talented!)

Spine.  Cover looks decent, maybe a bit overshiney.  Doesn't feel quite as sturdy as my CM book.

First page with some notes on what we were up to that year.  That's pretty much all the journalling I did.  The rest of the album is just places and dates.

The print quality is fine.  The colour is quite good but the photos are a bit noisy.  Honestly I haven't found a printer that has the quality I would like (as good as photos) but CM is a bit better.

I was a bit annoyed with Picaboo's crop lines in the program.  They are very vague and don't have any difference between the gutter and the outside edge.  Obviously it eats more on the gutter side, so I'll adjust that next time I use them.

Back cover

Little S looooves having a book full of photos of us.  Picaboo was having a 2 for 1 deal (they often seem to have really good sales) so I got a book for her as well.  It's still shrinkwrapped and tucked away for when she leaves home.  I'd like to get doubles for the girls as I go so that they have albums ready for them.

She loved it so much that she decided to read it aloud to the kokeshi doll I picked up at a garage sale this morning.

That she convinced her father to put a diaper on (everything wears diapers these days.  Also Little A's shoes and dresses keep showing up on stuffies.)

She loooves it.  I had intended to put in on a shelf somewhere...at least it only cost $2?

Little A had no opinion on the book.  Probably because she wasn't in it.

Fingers!

Sorry, I got distracted there.  

Moral of this story:  Creative Memories makes a better quality book.  Picaboo makes a half decent book for cheaper.  I'll be doing important albums through Creative Memories (Little A's baby book) but can't afford them all the time as they almost never have sales.  I'm still planning on trying out Shutterfly on one of my remaining books, so I'll let you know what I think.  I'm not planning on using Blurb, I'm not wild about the print quality of books I've seen, and I'm doing 8x8 books and they don't make that size.

A week in the life

I've mostly decided to do Ali Edwards' "A Week In The Life" project. So next week from the 25th to the 31st I'll be taking lots of pictures and doing some journaling of our everyday lives. It seems like a fun way to remember what life is like right now. Not just the big things, but the small important things.

I'm going to try and get the layouts mostly done ahead of time, to make the process easier. I'm thinking that I will use Paislee Press' "Hello, Love" set (and maybe try and be a bit more scrapbooky, her stuff is so inspiring). I'm planning on doing it with my CM program but I may print it through Picaboo as I've heard they are decent and the price is lower. It's just a small project, so a good one to experiment with. It's going to be an 8x8 custom hardcover.



Soooo, anyone up for joining me?

S's Baby Book

I was very excited yesterday to get little S's baby book! It's an 8.5x11 hardcover done in chocolate brown bookcloth from Creative Memories. At 97 pages it's a pretty decent sized album and barely within the printing limit (100 pages).

It's just as pretty as I had hoped! Even some of the less wonderful pictures look pretty good at small sizes.



The cover is plain, I wish you could get it with a bit of text, but they don't do that with the bookcloth. I thought about doing a window, but I really wanted the first page to be the ultrasound pics and that's not the cutest for the cover!


Every month starts off with a full page portrait shot and a wordle collage. I love how these turned out!




I kept (and still do) a simple word document that I write in every couple weeks with what she's up to, so I have a spread in every month with those notes.


And then of course just a lot of photos and some journaling of her adventures!



I'm feeling pretty good to be holding it in my hands when she's only 16 months old! And that's number 9 checked off my list!

Scrapbooking Sunday

I'm finished S's baby book! Still have to proofread but all the pages (97) are done. Now I just have to scrape together the money to get the thing printed...

Anyway, each month has a full page photo and a word collage for the title spread. I didn't have a decent headshot for her 12 month (we were pretty sick most of that month...and the lighting was not so good) so I did a collage of her from each month. She was so little and squishy!



Oh oh, and I have a facebook page now for my Creative Memories business. Like me!

Scrapbooking Sunday

A spread from little S's baby book. I got many pages done tonight! Self high-five!

Scrapbooking Sunday!

Still missing summer.

Scrapbooking Sunday

I can't wait for July to come back!

Scrapbooking Sunday

July title page for my 2010 album. I was wandering about pintrest yesterday (as I am in the habit of doing when procrastinating) when I stumbled across Paislee Press. Full of love! I can count on one finger the times I've ever been tempted to buy premade templates. And that would be this set. You should check her stuff out, is very pretty and simple! And you can use it for the most part in Storybook Creator.

Scrapbooking Sunday

Something simple

Scrapbooking Sunday

I love this page. I really need to try and take some photos like this again. I have a remote now, so it would be a bit easier (these were taken with my point and shoot, by me)

Scrapbooking Sunday

Scrapbooking Sunday

In honour of my poor little kitten. He lost his manhood and got a cone around his neck this week. And to add insult to injury he keeps getting kicked out of bed for waking me up with his efforts to groom through plastic. We love you Finny!

Scrapbooking Sunday

A two page spread from Little S's baby book. I've been keeping a file with notes every month of things to remember. Then I usually do a page of them each month for her book. Some are milestones, some are just cute little things I want to remember.

Scrapbooking Sunday

A favourite page from my only finished book so far. This is the Chinese Garden in Portland. I love doing pages like this with little details that don't necessarily make great photos all on their own.

Scrapbooking Sunday

Here's my latest scrapbooking page. Still working on my Christmas album. More details here.

Scrapbooking Sunday

I can't remember if I've mentioned this, but a couple months ago I started selling Creative Memories. This made the people in my life who love me laugh a bit because I actually didn't scrapbook. At all. Ever really. But two things happened. One, I had a baby and decided that she deserved more than a facebook album and two, I found the Creative Memories Storybook Creator Software.

I love it, it's something that really works for me. I can make clean, unfussy pages with a lot of creative freedom, and I can get them printed into a nice quality hardbound book. Love.

If you are at all interested, you can ask me about it anytime. You can also order the program and a lot of other fun scrapbooking stuff and nonsense (both digital and traditional) through my site: http://ca.mycmsite.com/sites/hannasandvig. Books ordered through me can only ship to Canada however.

Anyway, long story...long, here's my current project:


I made my own digital paper using patterns in photoshop (would that be a helpful tutorial?) and am using the tags shapes set and handwritten word brushes by Ali Edwards. This is probably my most scrapbooky looking project yet.

I'm doing pages digitally but getting them printed out as individual 12x12 prints. I'm then buying a pretty coverset so that I can add pages every year. Sandvig Christmas Album. I'm excited to start this tradition for my little family!

SS: Dancing layout

Just wanted to share my favourite page so far from little S's baby book. She doesn't do this wiggling thing as much anymore which is kind of sad, but it's because she's discovered that she has feet to play with, which is super cute!

Scrapbooking Saturdays: Wordle

So I take a million pictures, as I'm sure you've noticed. And I am very organized about downloading them, sorting them into dated folders and uploading them to share here and on facebook. What I'm not doing is printing them. So I've decided to start scrapbooking, only not really. I don't really like scrapbooking. I don't like all the fussy layouts, I don't like all the embellishments, I don't like pages that overwhelm the photos with stuff and nonsense. I don't like spending that much money on another hobby.

So I'm doing it Hanna style. This means digital, clean, and photo focused. Professionally printed and bound. Sound like fun to you? I'll be trying to post once a week (Scrapbooking Saturdays?) to give you some ideas and inspirations while I'm at it.

I'm using the Creative Memories digital scrapbooking program, Storybook, for little S's baby book. Not Photoshop. I will tell you why later. But for today, here's something fun to try:



Using Wordle to create word collages:
I'm using these for my title pages for each month in the baby book. I've thought wordle was a fun little program since I discovered it, but hadn't come up with a good use for it yet. The way it works is you copy paste some text, or give it a URL (such as your blog) and it makes this cool collage out of it. The words that are used the most turn up bigger. To use this in a more controlled way and make a collage like mine, do this:

1)In the "Paste in a bunch of text: " area type your title word four times, another important word three times and another fun word two times. Type the rest of your words once. If you want to have a phrase, put a ~ connecting the words to keep them together.
2) Hit "go" and mess around with the font, colour and layout options until you like it. I used custom colours, picking them in photoshop and then pasting the hex code into the custom pallet. They do have some nice preset colour pallets though.
3) Click on "print" but instead of letting it print, save it as a pdf file. I then opened it in photoshop as a 300 dpi 16 bit file and resaved it as a jpg so I could use it in Storybook. It's possible that there's an easier way to do this, but that's what worked for me.

That's it! Go forth and create strange collages!