To Scrapbook or Not?
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Years ago, I was a scrapbooking queen. I spent every spare dollar on supplies. I drove miles to visit scrapbooking shops and to attend scrapbooking conferences.
This was all pre-internet, too!
As our family grew, I determined that I would make sure that every milestone of my children’s lives would be carefully documented within the pages of color coordinated scrapbooks. I was a dreamer.
Yes, yes, I was.
Fast forward ten years or so. The boys, ages 13, 10, 8, and 6, each have at least one album. The girls? None. Other things have taken precedence over my scrapbooking hobby.
However, I don’t want my girls to follow the typical pattern of “the baby doesn’t have a baby book.” So, I’m turning to you for advice and input.
What would you do?
As it’s been four years since I last cropped a photo, I’m a little “behind the times” in terms of products that are available and techniques that are being used.
One of my goals this year is to do something with our photos. I figure this project is a good one to figure out.
I don’t have time for cute or elaborate layouts. I have four years of photos stored digitally. The choices, as I see them, are
- do nothing
- do my best to physically cut and paste simple designs and get my girls’ albums complete
- create my albums online via Kodak Gallery or Shutterfly
- or ?????
Any suggestions?
If you had four years and two albums to document, what is the quickest and simplest way that you would approach it?
Considering the expense, time, and space I would totally recommend digital scrap-booking. It’s all stored on the computer, you can walk away at any time and not worry about the kid’s messing it up, on top of all this you only buy products once and then you can reuse them.
I have a Macbook so I use iphoto as well but have read that Shutterfly is great! (The best of the publishers). The books I have created are “cocktail table” beautiful compared to my scrapbooks. It would take me a day to scrap a page and people would ooh and aah about my pages rather than my photos. Now it is about the content of my photos—and I can be creative. I can do a book on “boating” and throw in pictures from many years and another of Christmas past and present. Such fun—allows for so much creativity in a totally different way. And the final product looks like “college” compared to “kindergarten”.
I haven’t been able to read through all the comments, but I LOVE the books you can make with iPhoto. The quality is fantastic!! Good luck!!!!
Another suggestion is to invest in a dvd slideshow program and create “scrapbooks” they can view on the tv.
Your story sounds very similar to mine. I was heavily into Creative Memories. I would drag my husband around to scrapbooking stores each weekend, despite the fact that we had a good one right here in town. I had my own Accucut machine and about 100 dies for it. However like you, life got busier and scrapbooking fell the wayside. I tried digital scrapbooking for awhile. It definitely is less expensive but still time-consuming. So now what I do is create a photo slideshow of each year and put it on dvd. The program I have allows you to put text with each picture so I still am able to make note of what is in each picture. You can also put music with it if you like. The software converts it to a format that can be viewed on tv. Much less time-consuming, yet our photos are still in a form everyone can enjoy. I also do the blog into a book thing for our family that an earlier commenter mentioned. Despite having a ton of supplies, I doubt Iwill go back to traditional scrapbooking ever again.
Jess- Do you still do a family blog? You can turn your blogs into books OR I also use shutterfly and make vacation or holiday books. They always have deals going. Good luck!
My husband LOVES video editing and is convinced that photo albums are “obsolete”. Therefore, we frame pictures we really love, and my husband creates beautiful highlight videos of our babies using pictures and videos of them. They are wonderful! We can burn copies for our families and watch them together periodically to remember. If that is your cup of tea, it is an inexpensive and really neat heirloom to create.
What program does your husband use for video editting? Also, I want to store my videos on the web somewhere….but don’t have a web-site. Any recommendations??? You Tube? Is there any others? Thanks!
I was a CM consultant for almost 7 years and while I still have tons of supplies I have fallen in love with Digitial Scrapbooking. I Use the Creative Memories software and add my own bits and pieces to it… I love that I can work on a page or 2 and not feel like I’ve made a huge mess. We also use the CM software with our homeschool co-op to create our annual yearbook. You can print pages at most online places as well as places like Costco. I actually created a couple pages for the boys printed them twice and did the journalling by hand for each boy.
Hands down – go to http://www.mypublisher.com/ and do a digital one. You send the photos, pick your layout and they ship you a shiny, professionally done deal when it’s all done. And it doesn’t cost a ton. We do it for our mission teams.
Another supporter of Project Life!! I have been doing it for 2 years now and LOVE it. It is also so adapable that you can use it to record all baby’s firsts, school days, favorite pictures from the month/year, etc. The ideas are enless. It is a great product – so well made, the binder is worth it’s weight in gold. This year I plan to do monthly layouts instead of 365 pictures again – just to change things up. Good luck, can’t wait to hear what you decide to do!
From your photo I can see you are familiar with Creative Memories. I was never much of a fan of their traditional scrapbooking stuff (tools yes, but paper and add-ons not so much). But their digital scrapbooking is awesome and the program is easy. AND it can be made for a fraction of the cost of those traditional style books in a fraction of the time. Digital scrapbooking is the way to go.