Manna from Heaven

I know not many of you will care about this, but it's changing my life. Seriously.

I like scrapbooks. I like to look at old pictures of others and myself (well, some of them). My memory isn't the sharpest, so having pictures helps me remember events and people I would have never remembered otherwise.

However, I don't like scrapbooking. Through August 2007, I went through the motions to create books to take up space on shelves. But since August (close to Rhett's conception--any relation? I think so), I haven't done anything. Sure, I've taken tons of pictures and even organized those I'd like to have in a scrapbook. But I couldn't get myself to print them and put them in pages.

Then came along digital scrapbooking. We bought Photoshop Elements and I was determined to catch up on the scrapbooks. But our seven-year-old computer was destined to keep me from doing just that. Seems that running Elements on a weak computer isn't the greatest idea if you actually want to use Elements. It was incredibly frustrating; so I stopped.

Then came Blurb. My sister uses it and loves it and creates beautiful books from it. I tried it, but found that it didn't work well with the silly blog I keep. I post weird things from "why-oh-why did I change my last name?" to silly polls. Only every once in a while do I include pictures that I'd like to keep. It was too cumbersome to sort through everything to find the gems. Besides, I don't post all the pictures I'd want in a book. So that went out too.

Then there was Lulu. For Christmas 2008 I made two books for two of my nephews. I used a site called Lulu but fought with Elements to do so. When I recently saw that Lulu (a self-publishing website) has a Word template that you can use to create you own books, I thought "This is it!" I am really good with Word and knew I could make this work. It would mesh my style of layout with journaling and would be perfect. I just didn't know it would be so ugly. I started but didn't get beyond the first month because I just had this plain white page looking back at me and I didn't like it.

[Cue the pillar of light to surround me, please.] Then I found Shutterfly. I'm sure I'm the last person to find this (making this post useless, but just in case...), but it is makes me so unbelievably happy. They create these photo books and have an option for you to customize. What does that mean? it means that I am going to create awesome photo albums that look great, aren't bulky, and are created on a computer! I love everything about that. All I had to do was upload the pictures I want, drag them into their correct pages, pick different layouts and backgrounds, edit with text, and publish! Seriously that easy. If you do an 8x11 book, with a hard cover, and 60 pages, it works out to be almost exactly $1/page. If you do more pages, the price per page decreases; of course, if you do fewer pages, it's more expensive per page. And if you get it done by June 10th, you can get free shipping and 20% off (the prices I quote reflect this discount)! Can you tell I'm excited?! And really, considering the cost of paper, supplies, and printing the pictures, I don't think my $70 book will be considerably more expensive than doing it with paper.

I'll definitely be done by June 10th (yes, it's that easy). I'll show you the finished product when I get it. Oooh, mail gets exciting again!