I stopped scrapbooking at approximately the same time that Julia joined our family. That would be five and a half years ago. I needed to stop for a variety of reasons including the expense. Time also factored into the decision as pulling out all the stuff and getting a few pages completed took hours and left a huge mess to clean at the end, and that does not even include the shopping time required.
Determined to scrapbook our journey to Julia, I used My Publisher for a digital book. This remains a treasured keepsake with a great letter to Julia to start off the book, but it is very plain and many of the pictures were not included because of the expense.
In 2007 I went digital with my pictures and we stopped printing them. Scrapbooking stopped, and picture printing stopped. Instead I started blogging to keep up with the family stories and pictures. I realized, however, that kids like to look at pictures of their history in a family, and they prefer that they be in book form. I needed a solution and toyed with the idea of printing a book every month from my Snapfish account. This would be costly. I tried other services and found them to be hard to use if my pictures were not stored in Photoshop.
This is one of the reasons I love blogging and following blogs because sometimes you get some great mom ideas. While reading my friend Jill's blog last night, I learned about Project Life. Project Life is a product produced by Becky Higgins, scrapper extraordinaire. She offers this product which allows you to create a scrapbook over the course of a year in either a digital or hard copy format. Jill loves her 2010 digital book, so I decided to give it a try. I must admit that I was not impressed at first. I found it hard to use and a little frustrating. The only part I truly loved was that I could dump the pictures right into the program, and it notes which ones have already been used on the pages. However, I spent a few hours playing with it today and would up with eight, yes eight, pages by the time I finished. I still have some learning to do and would like to add more clipart to my pages, but I could never do that many paper pages or even close in the same amount of time. Unless I decide to go back and enter some snow day and Julia fashion pictures, January is complete. Now if I can find a few hours a month to complete each month, we may actually have a physical book of our 2011 pictures at the beginning of next year. I hope to complete 2010 simultaneously.....a little late, but I think this means I have a resolution for the new year. Well, I am not so late for the Chinese New Year which we celebrated at a Chinese buffet on Thursday. Happy New Year...welcome to the year of the rabbit!
Tamara, your blog is so great! I know, I love blogging now because you come across other blogs! I need to add the ones I follow to my page. I know, I know, the digital books are a little flat and one dimensional, and I don't think the kids like looking at them as much as the pretty paper/glue/embellishment ones, but hey, at least the year is recorded. I am praying for you during this sad time...I read your post about Elie Wiesel's Night...I do think he returned to his faith. In his Nobel Peace Price speech he mentions continuing to believe in the God of Jacob and Abraham. I would need to go back and read the entire speech again to be sure, but that book profoundly impacted me. Such despair, it's hard to wrap my human mind around it.
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