Photobook

Last year I got a photo book made up of the past 3 years (2010-2012) after I got a groupon voucher for a 100 page photobook.

You can see that one here, and we have a new one for 2013! I went with photobox again and I managed to get it done a bit sooner this year, as I pretty much made it before the end of the year and just waited to have the Christmas and New Year photos to put in. Then I waited for the sale! I ordered it in February, and I'm just as pleased with it as last year's. I've got them both next to the TV, this is 4 years worth of photos so it is a nice slimline way to get them printed rather than in thicker albums. It's also good being tenants to have photos printed to look at but not have to hang lots of frames.

I was a bit stuck for the cover, but went for this one taken when we went ice skaing at a Christmas market.  

The  first page is from our house warming party and night out in January.

Then skips to our trip to Paris in May, we must get better at taking photos of the day to day things!

 Then our engagement/my birthday party

Some nice family shots here, some were taken by my mum's partner Simon on his better camera hence the better photos!

We played skittles after dinner, as we had rented out the back room/skittle alley of the pub.

Me presenting the apprentice award in the category that I won in 2012 to the winner in 2013, with Minty trying to help/lick the pages

Then a few photos to show what we did over our lovely summer last year

When we went to Cornwall for a few days in the glorious summer sunshine...oh I am looking forward to Summer this year!

Climbing montage

Our trip to Albania

A few from my Brother and Cousins 21st Birthday, Tom's work Christmas do and some random walks and nights out (must take more like this!)

Christmas - at my Mum's then Tom's Mum's

New Year - I took hardly any photos and I am in none of them, but you can see how we kindly decorated our hosts bedroom and cloakroom :)

Cat photo montage, I had a surprisingly small amount of photos of them I thought I would have loads!

And finished off with a bit of a blog montage

I again had pages to spare (the same happened last year) so ended up adding in the pet and blog photos at the end just to fill space really. My new years resolution is to take more pictures of things that aren't a 'special occasion' as we take photos on holidays and big nights out, but never of just walks, trips, meals etc and these are the things that make up a year.

It is nice to look back over the photos from the past year while making this, we had a pretty great year! This year the book is going to be full of some wonderful photos so hopefully we won't struggle to fill it, with a trip to Snowdon which we booked on Sunday, our engagement photoshoot, climbing in Stannage and then Kilimanjaro we are going to have plenty of beautiful photos.

Have any of you been printing photos recently? Do you go with albums, frames, or something different?

Picture Positioning

I had a massive sort out of the bedroom and my clothes over the weekend, if you're interested in buying anything see my ebay page http://myworld.ebay.co.uk/willow5001. Loads of bargains most stuff starts at 99p! Anything that doesn't sell will go off to swapping websites or the charity shop as I love all the space in the bedroom now, post to come on that!

After hanging some pictures on the wall in the living room and playing with some table settings, I've moved some pictures and canvasses around in the flat, so just a quick update on the bookshelves and turtle tank.

The tank did look like this

A little cluttered and some of the photos were getting damp due to being near to the seam in the lid, now it looks like this

A bit less, the photos are all here now 

In the bookshelves in the hallway, I moved the pinboard in here as well and a few other pictures as the candles and canvases have moved off (one canvas on the table, the other 2 currently homeless). Also the china doll sherlock holmes lives here in the corner, no comment on that one it's not mine.

So that's the little change around a few weeks ago, there have been a few more switches recently, updates soon!

Photobook

I placed an order for this last week and it arrived on Friday

It's a photo book of the last 3 years, I hope to do one per year from now on. I'd seen a lot of them around and saw a post over on young house love how they do one every year, but ones I'd seen here seemed expensive. This 100 page book would have cost just over £100! I got a groupon voucher though so only paid £29, for 100 pages of photos that's a bargain, next time if I'm only doing one year I probably wouldn't need so many pages and will look out for vouchers and offers. It's from photobox, I've also used them before for printing photos and they were pretty quick and good quality.

I started with some old photos and the one on the cover is also from 2009, I went for 2010 as a start point as this is when we got a decent camera, all the photos before 2010 are from phones and disposable cameras so there aren't many and the ones we have aren't great quality. I chose a handful of the best ones for the start of the book.

It was really easy to customise, I liked having some large photos and some smaller photos in different layouts

Or mixing up sizes on different pages

Even the smaller photos came out really well though and it's great to get so many photos on one page when they are silly photos from nights out etc that don't necessarily need a full page to themselves. Also as a tenant it's great having so many photos printed but not needing to find ways to display them in frames when we can't put them on the walls. 

The captions were also easily customised and I could change font, colour, size, placement etc

 I also chose the background colour, and will try and get future ones in the same colour as well

I did discover that 100 pages is actually a lot to fill so I added in some divider pages and some with only 1 or 2 photos on

It's really nice to have the last few years photos in one place and as it's a book it's so much slimmer than having all of those photos in an album and looks a bit more polished. Please excuse the mess on the table in this photo, can you believe we have to start brushing the cats teeth (every day as well!), we are just starting off and getting her used to it so the table is strewn with all the cat tooth cleaning stuff so we can just grab it when she comes up onto the sofa.

I tried to get it in chronological order but after being transferred between a few computers some of the photos had lost their time stamps but from memory I've tried to get them roughly in order!

I've really also tried not to just have holiday photos but also photos of day to day things, parties etc. We took over 600 photos when we went to America last year so it would have been easy for the whole book to just become holiday pictures, but I have a lot of those printed out already and in frames around the flat.

It was difficult though when we went to such a beautiful place!

The hardest part was actually getting the photos together, as I realised we had uneven amounts of photos, like loads of Graces birthday and not many of Olivias! Although Toms sister Becky kindly emailed us a load of pictures. We really just need to take more photos and this year I'm trying to take the camera out and about with me more.

This project also found the end of my patience with our old desktop computer, I had to use it because all of our photos are stored on there but it's so hopelessly out of date that it just couldn't run the photobox website half the time, once I had the photos I wanted loaded onto the site (which took me literally days) I worked on my netbook but every now and then realised I had forgotten one and had to go back through the very lengthy process of trying to upload more. All sat at our very unsuitable desk (You can't get your legs under it and the chair doesn't tuck in so you end up slumped over to reach the keyboard) on our mangled old office chair. So we might be getting a new computer sooner rather than later, if I had my way it would have gone out the window that day!

I think it was worth the stress and the back ache any way as we got hundreds of photos printed for under £30 and the book looks great! I was really impressed with the process of putting it together once I was on a working computer, it really is easy just to drag and drop photos into spaces, choose the layouts and add any captions etc.