Thursday, January 26, 2012

another (year) bites the dust

I have always been a photo album nerd.  I have tons of them.  Just a few months ago I was at my mom’s house, and I found a cabinet full of all the albums I made growing up…there are at least 20 of them.  I used to have a disposable camera on me at all times, and all the prints I got would always go straight into an album. 

Even once the digital world came around, I was still always diligent about ordering prints and filing them away in an album every year. I have a shelf with at least 5 albums on it now, which just covers the past couple years, and a box somewhere with I couldn’t even tell you how many more albums inside.  Not to mention the separate albums I have from vacations, our wedding, our honeymoon…  See what I mean? Photo album nerd.

Anyway, over the past year or so I have gotten bad about ordering prints.  (I think part of that is because the number of photos I take has significantly increased…)  And any of the prints I did order, well, those have started to accumulate into quite a large pile.  So, after seeing the idea on several other blogs and on Pinterest, I finally figured out how to solve my problem.

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A yearly photo book!  I already upload my pictures to Shutterfly on a (somewhat) regular basis, so all I had to do was drop them into one of their templates, tweak a few things, add some text, and viola!  Not to mention they were having a sale, so the whole thing only ended up costing around $20.

I basically just went in chronological order, and made a page (or in some cases a couple pages) for each event, adding a little text here and there.  Here are a few of the pages (most of which you will recognize, because I’ve blogged the pictures already):

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This was one (of 6!) pages from our vacation to Texas in July.  Highlighting our crazy zip lining adventure, as well as the 4th of July.

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This is my concert page… in July we saw 311 (if you do not know by now that this is my favorite band, you must not pay much attention…) and I also saw the New Kids on the Block and the Backstreet Boys with my mom and cousins.  It was a boy band dream, let me tell you.

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And as you can imagine, miss Lexi makes a few appearances in the book. :)  The session we did in August was one of my favorites, so I had a hard time picking just a couple of pictures to include…

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These pictures are from a Royals game we went to with our friends Ash & Zach (who you may have seen before on here…) and also the Chiefs home opener game on 9-11.

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And of course I had to do a spread for Halloween.  I don’t think I ever blogged these pictures (they aren’t my best work…what can I say…party + point & shoot - does not equal high quality photos!), but as you can see we had some interesting characters attend the party we went to.  Snooki and The Situation even made an appearance!

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And then on the back cover I had to put a few “family photos”.  Of course we don’t have one with all 5 of us together (I don’t think that will ever happen…) but at least when I look back through this album I’ll be able to see how cute all of our furbabies were in 2011!

I am now planning on keeping this tradition up and making a new book each year in January.  Although I still have an entire shoebox of pictures from 2010, and even some from 2009…I have yet to decide if I will just ditch the prints and make a 2010 photo book or if I’ll actually fill up one last album (or two.  or three.  I have a lot of prints in that box…)

I’ve already looked through this book at least 10 times.  And I will probably look through it another 10 times before I move it off the coffee table and onto the shelf with all of the other photo albums.  I just love it, what can I say!  Did I mention I was a photo album nerd?

2 comments:

  1. Great job!!! It's like I can thumb through the book again. I like that idea about an annual photo book. Maybe I can learn how to do that. I love your blog!!!!

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  2. This is such a great idea Brooke!! I might have to make one for myself. I always give my mother in law a book like this, usually once a year and she loves it. But, I also have the problem of taking tons of pics and they just sit in their folders on my computer. I love this.. the only thing, it makes me feel pretty lame.. our year wasn't nearly as exciting as yours. lol. We will have to make up for that in 2012 :)

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