Bound Book!!!

[Quinn]

yay!!!!! I'm so excited because yesterday I picked up my completed bound book of all my digi-layouts and blog entries for the year of 2007. It turned out better than I dreamed of! I'm so glad I did this and I'm planning on continuing to make one each year. I made my book through Cherish Bound and am so pleased with the quality and pricing! It really came together. My book is over 100 pages long and it's less than an inch thick. This got me thinking how easy these yearbooks will be to quickly grab in an emergency. I feel so relieved to have our family's history for last year preserved. I love blogging and digital scrapbooking for making it so easy to stay on top of documenting our life. This book is a such a treasure to me! I'll try to snap some photos but I doubt they'll turn out good enough to really see how it turned out. But I'll bring it to the retreat for sure. Yay!!!

[Kelly]

I'd love to see it! :)
Snap a quick picture for us, will you?!??! :)
-kelly

[Tori Easton]

I would love to see it also

[chryslergreen]

Yes, show us please! I love the idea of a hard bound book... Did you format your blog on your own to fit into the book, or does the company do that for you? I'd love to have a hard copy of my blog as well.

[peetie]

How exciting! I can't wait until I get enough scrapbook pages together to have it made into a book. My kids will love looking at all the pictures. My plan is to buy one for each of the kids, so when they move out, they will have their own pictures. Please post a pic, if you get a minute.

[JoDee:)]

Wow!!! That is awesome!!! And I love how everyone can have their own books. Where did you have it done?

[Quinn]

well, your cheering got me brave enough to snap some photos. Sorry for the quality... shooting things with shiny surfaces boggles my mind! Anywho... the first is the cover & the other photos are of the inside. The text photo shows how I did my entries in paragraph format. I just highlighted all the text in each of my blog entries, copied & pasted them into the text space when I made the book. I really liked this format because it looks really clean. Also, on some of the text pages there was space to have photos above, so I put in some of the photos I had used in my blog entries (the ones I didn't scrapbook). I should have gotten a photo of that, too... dang it.

[Quinn]

p.s. I chose to not have a white background & instead used that antique-looking paper as the background on every page. It didn't cost me any more; I just liked the look of it better.

[Angie I]

Quinn,
This book is amazing!! I love the whole idea. I have an 8 year old and a 5 year old with about 4 volumes of scrapbooks each that are huge!! I cannot imagine asking them to bring a uhaul truck to come and take away the albums I would have collected over the years! I will give this a try for sure.

[rizkid22]

Oh my gosh Quinn, I LOVE this!! Thank you so much for sharing. I am definately going to check out the web site.

[rizkid22]

Umm...Quinn could you provide the link to the website? I keep coming up with a business MLM scheme.

[Shellie]

That is awesome Quinn! I think you have inspired me. :D

[a_c_danica]

beautiful! I can't wait to see it!

[Karen]

That is too cool! I love it! what an awesome idea. You will love having those books! Someday after i get this whole thing down I am trying it! I love it!

[Kelli West]

Quinn, the book looks amazing! I loved how you did everything! Very beautiful!! I think that is what I am going to do!

[Quinn]

Here's the link to Cherish Bound (http://www.cherishbound.com/). Here's the link to their products page (http://www.cherishbound.com/products/publishing.php). I made the 8.5x11" landscape book and added tons of pages (my book is 104 pages long). Although I don't remember the exact cost, I know adding pages was very reasonable. Also, one thing I noticed when comparing publishing companies was the cover quality. Several places offered that you could custom make a sleeve to go over the book cover, which I thought was way yucky because the sleeves usually get torn to pieces over time. With Cherish Bound I made the cover in photoshop & it's imprinted into the book cover (no extra charge). Through my searching I think Cherish Bound has the highest quality & most times has the best prices. When Crystal & I figured it out it came to be just over a dollar per page.

[Kelli West]

thanks Quinn, I will have to do taht!!!

[jessie97]

That looks great. I did a book with shutterfly and really like the way it turned out. I will just need to proof or have some one else proof my journaling because there was a lot of miss spell words which made me really mad.

[rizkid22]

Thanks so much Quinn!! This is so freakin' awesome! I want to do one for me, but I also want to do one of those small books for my mom and MIL for mother's day. Really reasonably priced I think.

[peverill]

Quinn that is a a cute book it looks like you did a great job on it. I am not good at journaling. It looks like you did a lot of that.

[Quinn]

I am not good at journaling. It looks like you did a lot of that.
Paula, the journaling is just the entries from my blog during 2007. It would have been tough to do so much journaling just while putting my book together. You should start blogging, Paula! :)

[Sarah Ellsworth]

This blogging thing is everywhere. I've been seriously toying with the idea of starting one of my own. Seems like a fun and easy way to get some journaling done. How do you actually go about starting a blog? I'm probably way behind the times on this one.

[A-to-Z]

Wow Quinn!! I love your book!! It looks great! I need to be better about blogging.

Sarah there are a few sites that let you make your own blog. One is www.blogger.com and one is www.wordpress.com

[Kim Hansen]

What a treasure Quinn!

[Kelli West]

This blogging thing is everywhere. I've been seriously toying with the idea of starting one of my own. Seems like a fun and easy way to get some journaling done. How do you actually go about starting a blog? I'm probably way behind the times on this one.

First off, i don't think I ever said welcome to you...so WELCOMEE!! glad to have you on board!! second, I started blogging and love it!! I find I actually WRITE down my life! I am horrible at keeping a journal, but am on the computer a lot, so the blog has helped!! Do it Sarah, you won't regret it! Hope to see your blog soon!! :)

[Sarah Ellsworth]

Thanks for the blog info (and the welcome). I'm going to give this some serious thought. For some reason I have it in my head that blogs are for beautiful people who can jet-set on the weekends and have fabulous things to write about. Sadly, my life's not that exciting. I just really love what Quinn did with her book. You've inspired me! I think that would be such a neat gift to give my girls each year.

[supermombritt]

Quinn that is so neat. I guess I just need to kick it in gear and get enough pages done to do that. I think I will start with this year.

[chryslergreen]

Thanks for the blog info (and the welcome). I'm going to give this some serious thought. For some reason I have it in my head that blogs are for beautiful people who can jet-set on the weekends and have fabulous things to write about. Sadly, my life's not that exciting. I just really love what Quinn did with her book. You've inspired me! I think that would be such a neat gift to give my girls each year.

My life is not that exciting either, and only those who know me read about it (I think! I'm not sure why anyone else would.) But one thing I've found about blogging is that it has really helped inspire my scrapbooking! After I blog about something, I often make a page about it - for instance I posted about some funny/cute things my son recently said, and it inspired me to scrapbook about it, which I probably wouldn't have done otherwise.

[dovegirl]

So...does anyone get nervous about this blog thing. I keep thinking about it, but I can't decide how comfortable I am with my kids pictures out there. I know you can make it private, but...... I don't know. Any thoughts?

[tpowers]

I am with you. I keep thinking about it but, am worried. I did look into the security at blogspot.com(i think) and they have where your blog is by invitation only. The person has to be invited by you and then either join their site to see your blog or the invitation expires in 2 weeks. If I decide to do this I will use the security option.

[Quinn]

With my own blog, I never post specific place information that could give away where we live. Even with our home remodel photos I will blur out our license plate if our car is in the photo & only take photos of our house & not the neighborhood. I also never mention what city & state we live in & I've heard it's good to not mention the exact name of the school your kids go to on your blog.

The private invitation is a safe way, for sure. When I used blogger I had a weird comment posted about how someone liked my blog, but they had found it by perusing blogs & I had no idea who they were. It kind of unnerved me. Had I stayed with blogger I would have made mine private, probably, but my blog is constantly being given to extended family & family friends that it would be really difficult to keep up on giving everyone access.

I figure that someone would have to really try hard to try to figure out all about my family from our blog. And I try to keep specifics to a minimum. I just assume that everyone reading knows where we are & I don't need to write much about that. As long as you're smart, I think it can be safe. Also, I'll be teaching my kids that just because someone knows their name & may say they know their parents they shouldn't trust them. In the world we're living in, that's just how it has to be taught, regardless of if you have a blog.

[chryslergreen]

(If your blog is not private) You can also block it from search engines... meaning if someone were to try to google you or your kids or something, your blog and any pictures posted on it would not come up in the search.

[Jill]

Quinn, I am a little late in commenting, but I am so glad you posted this idea. I am loving it. I started a blog too, just for this reason. So great. Thanks!