Sweet Shoppe Designs – The Sweetest Digital Scrapbooking Site on the Web

We’ve added a fun, new weekly post during this summer! We’ve loved having the SugarBabes hang out with Stacia and I on the blog. 🙂 We only have a few more weeks of this & i’m so sad. I’ve loved seeing what the SugarBabe’s write.  Today we’re lucky to have Zakirah with us & she’s showing off her newest photobooks. Thanks Zakirah!

Hi Sweet Shoppers! It’s Sugarbabe Zakirah here with this week’s Sugarbabe Sunday.

Remember Vanessa’s post about how our generation is the most photographed generation, but they never see them printed? Sad, isn’t it? Since taking digital photos only require a device and a hard disk to store the files, most people think it’s enough to have them in their computer. Besides, we take too many photos anyway, and choosing the ones that we actually want to keep could be daunting when facing with 1000 photos.

I was one of those people a few years ago, until I discovered digital scrapbooking. When I started scrapping, I didn’t give much thought about printing my pages out because most of them are experimental and I was still learning my craft. Fast forward a few years later, I saw the importance of printing the pages out as a book, but I put it off because of a few reasons, one of it is because it costed quite a lot of money to print.

This year, however, I decided that I should no longer put it off, so I thought I should start with a personal album – a Book of Me.

It turned out that I had enough pages to make 2 books (I had more than 120 pages), so I bought 2 coupons – one for 40 pages, and another one for 80 pages. I knew that I could just print them all into one book, but after calculating the costs, additional pages would make the book more expensive so I bought 2 coupons instead. It was the most economical option for me.

So here they are, my first scrapbooks, printed:

What I learned when attempting to print my first two albums:

• The reason why I’ve been putting off printing my pages is because I didn’t scrap chronologically and an album with a jumble of memories seem overwhelming to me. I can’t imagine my family enjoying to flip through an album that is jumbled. So I didn’t print because of that.
• Only buy photobook coupons when your book is almost finished, like when it’s at least 70% completed. NEVER buy if you’re only planning to print, but haven’t started yet. Before you know it, the coupons will expire and you’ve just thrown good money into the trash. And only buy when it’s a great deal. Shops like Persnickety run great deals during scrapping events like iNSD & DSD, so save the date and work your book/s toward completion.
• Don’t worry if your scrapping style has changed a lot. An album with a mixed scrapping style WILL look great. A minimalist page do look great next to an embellishment-heavy page. It creates BALANCE. Here’s a couple of examples (no, they’re NOT 2-pagers):

Now, I want to share with you my printed family book!

This year, I jumped into the PL bandwagon. I loved how the pages can look uniform, yet unique at the same time. I decided to give it a try and see if I can manage scrapping my family memories in PL form.

Here’s how I approach it:

• Scrap chronologically, and keep photos in separate weekly folders, together with videos & audio files that I want to share.
• I still love to scrap past events, but I don’t want to have to go back YEARS behind and make a PL album just for that year. So I create them as ‘flashback’ pages. Not all months will have these flashback pages, but some do, and that makes a lot more sense to me than trying to create a whole new album for a past year (and I’ll be FOREVER trying to catch up. No thanks!)
• Focus on scrapping monthly memories, not weekly. This has kept me sane because I realize that some weeks are more typical than the others, and I don’t want to make myself insane just because some weeks have less memories. I’m OK with that. My family will be OK with that too.
• As soon as I finished scrapping a spread/page, I immediately add it to the photobook printing software. The company that I print with, Photobook.com.my, has a software where we can add our pages and build it for printing. I use it to track my progress.

I started in January and in August, I managed to finish January-March. I’ve scrapped other months as well, but they’re not completed yet so I decided to print the first 3 months to see if I’m on the right track. Here it is!

 

The print quality is AMAZING! I love the buckram cover. Here’s some detailed shots…

So what do you think? Have you printed your scrapbooks yet?