I’m so happy to announce, I got my December Daily book completed – and it record time (for me)! I just finished up my 2017 December Daily book, which is a scrapbook of all of the days of the holiday season. Technically my book always includes a few days at the end of November (Thanksgiving, going to the Nutcracker, etc) because those are part of our Christmas traditions.
It’s a book of each day, but I take a lot of pictures, so it ended up being 45 pages instead of around 35. Each page was put together in Photoshop Elements. Photoshop was my first challenge because I had to upgrade! I haven’t it used it a lot lately, and when I was working on it, it kept crashing due to an update on my Mac which apparently it was not compatible with. It was well worth the money though, so update done!
As you can see from this 2010 page, my kids have grown up quite a bit since I started this tradition!
Each page probably took me at least a half hour to create. I had hopes to embellish the pages a little more, but in the end, I felt like the pages were “good enough”. I also struggled with the design and kit I had selected. After a few pages I wasn’t digging the color scheme anymore (I usually go with a more standard red and green color scheme), but once I got going, there was no turning back!
A super frustrating thing happened when I uploaded all of my finished pages to Shutterfly – I kept getting errors on my upload! I had 45 pages to upload, and I’d get a message that some of them failed. The first time around, only 19 pages uploaded. So I had to go pick each page individually and upload it again. Sooooo time consuming. Sometimes I had to upload the picture 3 or 4 times!!! I don’t know if this is a failure from our internet provider, Shutterfly, or what, but it sucked and made my night very stressful because I had a deadline to get this dang thing done (and use my coupon code, which expired 1/31/18!!). Ugh.
A very funny thing did happen when I was finishing up the cover the other night. I made the comment to Zach that I was struggling to make something “beautiful” on the cover. I mean, you can’t just slap a picture on it and call it done. Adding all of the shadowing, layers and other stuff is what really give it the extra pop in the design. Zach replied to my comment – “put a picture of me on it!”. I told him “I did. I put a picture of you and Sydney on there.”. Without skipping a beat he replied “well then take Sydney off.” Bahahaha! Nicely done Zach. What a funny guy! That brought tears to my eyes from laughing so hard.
Here’s the cover shot:
What begins as a labor of love, turns into quite a chore as the days go on, but still, this is such a great keepsake, I’m glad that I take the time to create these books.
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Q: Do you have a favorite photo/gift site – Shutterfly, or other?
Q: Do you use Photoshop (Elements or full blown CC)?
Q: Will you be watching the Super Bowl on Sunday??
We’ll probably watch some of it. For the commercials and half time 🙂
It seems like you have great kids! 🙂 They were so cute when they were little, but they still look the same, just more grown up.
Thanks! I really don’t have many complaints at all about my kids – maybe a little less bickering at times 🙂 Zach is almost as tall as Sydney now!
That is so creative and beautiful 🙂 The cover shot is perfect.
I think I may have lost my mind if my upload had all those issues though lol
Thanks Karen! I was really stressing because it was also the last day of our internet cycle and I knew we were close to getting an overage charge! Stupid data limit caps.