Photo Book Love

{click on any photo to enlarge}

I haven't really been able to blog about the photo books I've been making lately because they were gifts for Michelle and Betsy, but their birthdays have passed (they're both 39 now and I'm not) so I can finally write about these projects.


My first photo book was a 5x7 sized mini book that I made for the book club girls for Christmas the year we went to Paris (2007). I spent like 20 hours straight working on it, but was completely smitten with it and so happy to have a good surprise for their Christmas gift.


I was able to get a ton of pictures into the book (even though it was small book) and was especially pleased that I thought to scan my plane ticket, Paris receipts, and Louvre map to include in the book. I adore details like those.


The next book I made, was a full-sized, hardback photo book of my trip to Michigan to meet Betsy's baby Emmit in October 2008. I took a ton of pictures (as usual) on the trip and loved being able to put them in this format for her.


For Betsy's birthday this year I made her another big, hardbound photo book with pictures from our trip there last June. The kids and I were there for 6 days, so I took over 1000 pictures! It was no small task trying to decide which pictures to weed out.

My innovation this time around was to have the kids write about their favorite things from the trip, then I scanned those and put them in the book. Whitney drew pictures of course, and Landon made a top ten list. I love it that their handwriting and thoughts are documented like this.


When working on a book with so many photos, I tend to gravitate toward the templates that
hold 9 photos, but every now and again I include full-sized photos too.

I made a quotables page.

My next book (and best idea) was this Self-Portrait Tuesday book I made for Michelle's birthday a couple weeks ago. It's so rare that I come up with a good idea and still have time to make it happen, that I was euphoric about this. It was very hard not to talk to her about it while I worked on it! (That's always a problem for me when making a gift.)

In order to do this book I had to have access to Michelle's blog, so this isn't the sort of thing you could do for someone else unless you have their blog password.


My best innovation for this book was to call Lelly (thanks to Natasha for giving me her cell number) and having her write a foreword for the book. It made it so much more official, and just made sense since Lelly is the SPT mastermind and facilitator and is mentioned very often in Michelle's SPT posts.


The other idea I was pleased with was that I cut and pasted various comments from her SPT posts into a couple pages at the back of the book.


They're nice comments from friends and family and hopefully are ones she would want to remember anyway.


After working on Michelle's SPT book, I was itching to make one with my SPT posts, plus I had the added bonus of having a Blurb gift certificate just waiting to be used (Michelle had given me that for Christmas).


It was fun to revisit these SPT posts of mine, though slightly painful because I have a tendency to annoy myself. (It's a fine line really between cracking myself up and driving myself crazy.)


Still, I'm so glad I have these posts on my blog (which will become a many volumed book someday too) and are now in book form too. I can see areas where I grew and matured and others where I had big plans but little follow through (oh the shame).

Working on these books really made me see the value of participating in Self-Portrait Tuesdays. Those of us who participated ended up writing about so many things we probably never would have written about otherwise, AND got into the habit of taking self-portraits and including ourselves on our blogs. What a gift to ourselves and posterity really.

Sadly, I was so anxious to order my book that I totally forgot to cut and paste blog comments into my book (argh!!). I'm seriously bummed about that, but am a professional and will work around it. (A professional what? I don't know.)

Edited to add: Another thing I do is Google coupon codes for whichever company I'm making the photo book through--I've used My Publisher and Blurb and have found coupons for free shipping, a free book and other discounts. This is particularly helpful if you're making a big book like the books I made for Betsy because they can get quite pricey yet I wanted a copy for myself. On the most recent book I made for her I got a coupon code that gave me 20% off plus a free book, so I got a good discount and my book for free. Woohoo!

**Have you made any photo books?
Any tips or innovations to share?
Do you miss SPTs?**

Comment Window Tidbit: I'm getting my hair done tomorrow, tra la tra la tra la!