Cross One Thing Off

I finally get to cross one thing off my "big" to-do list (as opposed to my daily ongoing to-do list). I have finally finished my first Blurb photo book!

One of my Christmas presents to our parents was an IOU for a great photo book of the boys. I had planned on doing a fairly easy to pull together book from QOOP but then around Thanksgiving I discovered Blurb and realized that even though it would take more time to pull together, I just had to do it.

What I love about Blurb is the variety of layouts that you can choose for your book. In most of the other photo books that I had looked at, you pretty much just got to choose how many pictures on a page, maybe a few captions and that was it. Blurb's layouts give you far more flexibility than that (and if you know photoshop, you can even design your own layouts). The layout options make it really stand above the crowd as far as photobooks. It became much more of a creative effort, as opposed to merely a compilation of photos.

The free software was very easy to use (although it is a resource hog). I am currently uploading my completed book and will order 1 sample copy and hopefully if all goes well, will be able to order the ones for our parents really soon. I can't wait and am a bit nervous. It is one thing to see it on the screen, another thing to see it in print!

I had not planned on it taking quite this long, but between things like Christmas, birthdays, homeschooling, planning two seminars, getting a new laptop and other stuff, life happens I guess. I will say that I was good…I have been wanting to move on to another creative project I have in mind, but I made myself finish this before starting something new.

I will say that I really enjoyed this process…it was hard for me to consider it done…I kept finding more edits and adjustments to make. I am sure that next time I will do some things differently. But it is done and ordered, so now all I can do is wait and see how it turns out!