Our 2012 Family Album

Our family's 2012 photo album/scrapbook arrived in the mail today (cue fangirl excitement about seeing my scrapbooking layouts in print!)

 

Yep, 96 pages of scrapbooking layouts from our family's adventures during 2012.  I'm really happy with how it turned out, especially as I tried a couple of different things with this book.

I used the inside front cover pages to introduce the book. An inner title page, short bio on us as a family and our ages (something fun to look back on in years to come) and a summary of major events that happened to us during 2012. I printed on slightly thicker pages (and glossy) as I like the feel of both when looking at the book in person. It gives it a real 'coffee table' feel. :)

I didn't do a huge amount of double-page layouts for this album, but those I did complete look really nice (especially Rowan's party layout, which seemed a bit 'busy' when I finished it after his 1st birthday last year). Printed at 12x12", even the little details look fabulous and the font size is perfect. In fact, on layouts such as the Aqaurium one above, the font looks almost a bit TOO large when printed. This is something I'll make a note of for printing this year's book.

I like the way single layouts look too. Notice the white edging around each page? This was deliberate, as when I printed my pregnancy album, I had a bit cut off on each edge when it was printed, due to the guttering. The easy way around this was to make a template using the Blurb software that had the image slightly smaller than the page itself and applying it to each page before dragging and dropping each layout in.

The colours came up crisp and clear, and it inspires me to get even more of our pictures and stories off the computer. Growing up, I loved looking through our family albums, and I want to be able to do the same for our family too. 

The details: I design my layouts in Photoshop CS3, using a variety of digital scrapbooking kits and temples (I get most of mine here). I printed this book at Blurb.com in 12x12" (30x30cm) and used Premium Glossy paper. There were 96 pages and this book cost me $109 after applying a 20% off coupon. You can see the full book here.This entry isn't an advertisement, just wanted to answer the FAQ that I often get about my scrapbooking layouts and photobooks.

I have been a digital scrapbooker since 2009, but didn't get more heavily into projects until 2010 when pregnant with Rowan and wanted to teach myself a variety of techniques in order to create a pregnancy album.

Rowan's Photobook

I never got around to posting pictures of our Christmas presents to our families back in December (mainly due to them reading this blog and wanting things to remain a surprise!). We had books from blurb.com printed of Rowan's 2011. This started off with a few ultrasound and belly pictures (aww) and progressed to 10 pages of images per month post-bierth, resulting in a whopping 100 pages - WOW!

The quality of the printed images is surperb and we sprung for extra-thick pages, which really added a professional touch with the finished product (including a full-bleed photo cover). Everyone loved the books too! We didn't print one for ourselves because we'll be covering the first 12 months in April, the project is saved on our computer to make it easier for adding additional pages. :)

Here are pictures of the photobooks: