2013

I know this is the thing to do on blogs in January- but here is our year in pictures. I just finished editing our yearly photo-album for 2013. It's 450+ pictures, 150 pages and so beautiful and wonderful that I may just go crazy waiting for it in the mail. Of all my worldly possesions, the ones that mean the most to me and would be the hardest to lose are our homemade quilts and our photo books. I guess that justifies the expensiveness of both!

So here are some of my favorite pictures of the year - I know there are 100+ but I'm pretty proud of how well I narrowed these down! No labels, just images. The way I like them!

EDIT: For everyone who asked: I printed this year's book on Blurb.com (and have printed other books there as well.) I printed last year's books on Shutterfly.com and we have lots of books from there, too. 

They are both great quality, and each have pros and cons.

Blurb: Really easy to use and design, easier in fact, than Shutterfly- especially if you want to customize more. For a longer book with lots of pages, Blurb is a better deal because each extra page after the first 20 is only 25 cents, but on Shutterfly, each extra page is a dollar! For shorter or smaller books, I don't like Blurb as much- because they don't have an 8x8 or 10x10" book, which is the perfect size for Instagram books or to document a trip or event. You can usually find coupons for Blurb online, but they're never as good as the coupons you can find for Shutterfly. (Also, if you make a Blurb book and say I referred you by clicking {HERE} then we each get 20$. Yes, please!)

Shutterfly: We have several books from Shutterfly, and we love them all. The best things about Shutterfly, though, are that they send out regular coupons for 50% off books (which can bring a long 100$ book into a total reasonable price range), free shipping, and they also send me 1-2 free books a year. The free books are small, 8x8 or 10x10 and only have 20 pages, but we've used them all. Our Daddy Book was a free Shutterfly book, and we've also made smaller-sized books to showcase Instagrams or give as gifts to Grandparents.  Apparently, Shutterfly books have a page limit of 110 pages, which is hard to figure out unless you try to go over that number, and I found out the hard way - so I prefer Blurb for long books. The books can also be frustrating to edit if you want to nitpick the design like I do, since you can't save customized pages and don't have very much freedom to create pages from scratch. 

( Mom, Dad, Grandmas and Grandpas? Anyone who wants a book - let me know! They'll be like 60$ and include pictures from our whole year and both sides of the family. )