With all of our wedding pictures, I wanted to create albums for myself, our moms and our grandmothers.
I opted to create hand-crafted scrapbooks with white satin covered 8X8 albums for the grandmothers, which I thought would be a lot of fun. Making five albums, 20 pages each of wedding and engagement photos was quite the job and less fun, let me tell you! But they turned out lovely, and the recipients seemed to love them.
For myself and our moms, I designed leather-bound albums on Shutterfly (we opted to purchase the jpeg images of all our photos rather than rely on purchasing prints from our photographer — see Missouri-based Avia Photography here, consisting of husband-wife team Mallory and Brian Taulbee [they're geniuses!]). Anyway, the albums were tremendously easy, and price-wise, were so frugal once you considered the cost of developing photos and other scrapbook details and doodads I could have spent actually scrapbooking.
For Christmas, I used nearly every one of Shutterfly's creative offerings. I made one set of grandparents a calendar using pictures of flowers I took in their garden during the summer. I made my mom a personalized pad of peacock stationary. I created a lovely photo book using our honeymoon photos.
One of my favorite perks about using Shutterfly are the ever-changing sales. Some weeks, photo books are buy one get one 50 percent off. Some weeks, they are 20 percent off. You can get free shipping on various purchase amounts about every week, and other items are constantly going on and off sale. Figuring out when to order my projects (which are saved indefinitely) based on which sales are going on is quite fun for me.
I'm always getting promotional e-mails, including one a month ago giving me an online code for 12 free stationary cards (I believe this is because I nearly spent a lifetime savings' worth at the company in December), so I used it towards my Valentine's cards:
Check out Shutterfly's awesome Web site (P.S., you get a free $20 gift card for Shutterfly when you register for your bridal things at Target).
