I enjoy working part-time. It gives me the opportunity to do things for myself and I am not tied down on the weekdays at the school. Grocery shopping in the mornings on a weekday is the best since it's never crowded and you can always find parking right in the front of the store.
With all this 'free' time, I started my own little business. Scrapbooking, both traditional and digital, for clients. I personally scrapbook the girls' growing up, school years and all our vacations.
These are a few traditional scrapbooking pages...
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| Disneyland trips were some of their favorites.. we tried to get pictures with all the characters. |
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| My brother's wedding where the girls were the flowergirls. |
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| Playing in the snow... |
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| Swim lessons in the summer.. |
Ever since my husband got a digital camera, the amount of pictures I had traditional scrapbooked increased threefold. Eventually traditional scrapbooking took up too much space, materials-wise, so I have been transitioning to digital and I've have been very pleased with it.
There are a lot of digital publishing software out there. And I've checked out many. They are all different. It depends on your desired style, easiness of use, quality of the printed page, and of course cost. Cost is a huge factor because it is not cheap to make a digital album. But the benefit of doing a digital album is that you don't have to go out and purchase all the different materials: paper, embellishments, adhesive, album and printed photos. For a digital album, all you need is a computer with your pictures downloaded and appropriate software to be able to open the desired publishing software. It's organized and designed on the computer and you just click 'order' and a professionally bound album comes right to your door by a delivery service.
I've looked at many different scrapbook services.
creativememories.com
blurb.com
snapfish.com
costco.com
mypublisher.com
kodakgallery.com
iPhoto (apple.com)
shutterfly.com
I prefer Shutterfly for their variety of designs;
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| Trip to San Francisco to visit my brother at his work.. |
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| Our Annual Christmas Gathering with friends... |
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| Emily's 4th Grade album... |
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| Hannah's 2nd grade album... |
....and iPhoto (an Apple product made only on the Mac) for cost and efficiency.
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| Our Florida Trip... |
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| Our China Trip... |
Since I am now blogging, I can also make my blog into a hardbound book one day. If you have a blog, you might want to consider making it all a book for memories sake.
If you are like my family we have literally thousands of pictures on our computer. Now after my brother-in-law painstakingly scanned all our negatives (remember those brown strips we used to get with your pictures after you develop them at the store?) our pictures have increased tremendously. It's easy to forget you have them on your computer so I try my best to publish them all in an album so you can easily show your family or friends. It's much harder to show people your pictures with a laptop or have them come up to the computer monitor.
The nicest thing about digital albums.. You can print multiple copies to give away to those who treasure them... Aka grandparents.
This year I have already made 12 digital albums: 4 of which were gifts, 5 were for clients and 3 were for myself.
If you are interested in having me make an album for you, traditionally or digitally, pop me an email and let's chat.
