So I'm going to start today with a project that I have been needing to do for almost an entire year! Talk about procrastination {Oye}. A while back when Mike and I started to travel a lot I wanted a way to keep the memories of our travels {this has actually turned into a running theme ... you'll see during the posts this week.} Anyways ... the days of photo albums are long gone, in fact I don't think anyone really "prints" photos anymore. The Facebook albums have replaced the family photo albums ... lets just be real, its a lot easier to upload them.
I used to scrapbook a long time ago but that takes quite a bit of time, effort and money {you know those scrap booking aisles at Michaels suck you in for a good $50 before you even realize it}. Then I got a Shutterfly code for a Free 8 x 8 Photo Book and I thought that would be a nice transition into the new age of scrap booking. Not to mention I see those free codes ALL - THE - TIME.
Here is why I love to use these books to document our Vacations.
You can put the locations and dates on the binding for quick and easy locating - You can also put it right inside the front cover. This replaces writing the dates and locations on the back of photos {if you ever remembered to do that}
They are SO easy to customize and Shutterfly has hundreds of backgrounds, layouts, embellishments and fonts to choose from. Its like the scrap booking sticker aisle right at your fingertips! There are even themes to choose from so you don't have to be creative for them to turn out great.
Shutterfly will do the layout / book for you! How much easier can it get? The first couple of books I made I placed all my photos manually and it took a while. While I was catching up this time I tried the "place the photos for me" {although it doesn't say that exactly} option and it put the pictures in chronological order and made sure they all fit within to the 20 pages {or dispersed throughout if you don't have a ton of pictures} Then I went through and just tweaked the pages.
Adding Text - you can document things throughout the book by adding text captions to the pictures. This last one that I made I even wrote a little summary of what we did each day on our cruise.
They are cheap! I only order these when I have a Free Book Shutterfly Code and then I only pay shipping {unless I use any upgraded background and embellishments - which I usually don't because there are SO many free ones to choose from}. Although that may be why I have just ordered our Hawaii book {April 2014}.
You can also order multiple copies. One book I made was from Mike's Family Reunion and ended up ordering multiple copies for everyone, and that was their as their Christmas Gifts that year - Big Hit!
There you have it, my first DIY {ish} project I completed this weekend. Below I listed all the places I have collected Free Book Shutterfly Codes from.
- Shutterfly.com {sign up for their newsletters and get great offers often}
- My Coke Rewards {enter codes from coke caps for points & buy Shutterfly codes with points}
- Bing Rewards {use bing as your search engine to get points & buy Shutterfly codes with them}
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