Ditch the Photo Album: Tell Your Story with a Photo Book
I also did a photo book of our honeymoon to Thailand. I really wanted this book to be on our coffee table and look like a book about Thailand, as opposed to screaming “Our Honeymoon!!!!!”. You can see I added captions to point out the different temples and places we had been. I added a map with a flag in each place we visited before I added the pictures of that specific place (I have to thank my husband for this suggestion). I also decoupaged different items (e.g. entrance tickets to temples, maps, boat rides, etc.) we had saved to the back of the book (just like I did in our wedding book). I love how it turned out. I think it really tells the story of our trip around Thailand.
I did our honeymoon book on standard landscape, with the standard paper (this is not as thick as my wedding book paper, but had a little lustre which worked great with all of the vibrant colors we had captured). I, once again, selected hardcover image wrap.
When my wedding was over I knew I wanted to create my own wedding book. In my opinion I think the look of a photo book is much more interesting than that of a photo album. Designing your very own photo book allows you more flexibly and creativity. It allows you to tell a story.
Being the creative control freak that I am, I wanted to design my own wedding book. My photographer had shown Mike and I beautiful wedding photo books that she could do for us. Once I saw the price tag ($700.00) I almost fell over. Really? THAT much for a book?? After I thought about it, it made sense. Those things take time to make and the paper is super thick and expensive. I knew there had to be something similar I could do for a girl on a budget.
After I researched around, I stumbled upon blurb.com. This is exactly what I had been envisioning. This site lets you pick the size of the book, the cover type you would like and the paper quality. You can completely customize the look of your pages. I was also able to add text to some of the pictures. For example, I added lyrics from the song we did our first dance to, to the top part of the picture of us dancing. You can’t do that with a photo album! Well, you could, it just wouldn’t look as cool. :)
Not being sentimental when it comes to cards, I ended up throwing all of our wedding cards away. After I did, I felt guilty and thought there had to be a way to keep these without adding unnecessary clutter to my life. So, I called my dad and had him fish all of my cards out of the garbage (trust me, he loves this. He can find anything in a garbage can!) I came up with the idea to cut out sayings and special pictures from our wedding cards and decoupage them on the back of our wedding book. This turned out better than I had imagined!
You can see how I organized my wedding “story” below. My create-it-yourself (CIY) cost was $64.00 for the book and shipping.
I did standard landscape, on matte finished paper (this is a little extra because the paper is thicker), with a hardcover image wrap.
