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A few days ago, Mr. Mary Jane and I got a chance to meet with our photographer, Shawna Noel, and her associate Kory Wallen.
A week or so prior, I realized that I needed to get in contact with Shawna ASAP because even though she had told us she’d love to shoot our wedding, we hadn’t worked out any details, we hadn’t discussed a contract or solidified pricing, and she didn’t know that we’d moved our wedding to another county. I also realized that I had never actually met Shawna before, though we are Facebook friends and I know a relative of hers. So it was definitely time to meet our photographer!
Shawna and I exchanged several emails (she was OK with our venue-change and still willing to shoot us, hurray!!), and ultimately decided that Mr. Mary Jane and I would meet her and Kory at their office for coffee. Then we’d be able to chat and also look at examples of their photos and fun stuff like that.
We showed up a bit before five and they had coffee waiting for us from my favorite shop: Caribou. Shawna’s office space was really inviting and modern. Crisp light gray walls, vases of fresh flowers, and beautiful poster-sized prints greeted us as we stepped inside. (Hmm, I wonder if light gray would work in a room of our house? It might be a little too modern. Hmmm!)
We started talking to Shawna and Kory and soon it was like we were old friends. I can tell this is going to work out well for us. We mostly chatted about life and photography and weddings (she reads Weddingbee, so she knows as much as I do about our big day!). We did chat a little about pricing: we’ll be paying a little more because our venue is a 45 minute drive away now, whereas the Grand Forks courthouse would have been practically within walking distance of their office. We expected that, and it’s more than fine. Looking at their pictures makes me forget my budget entirely.
In preparation for our hometown reception over the fourth of July weekend, I’m checking out options for printing a good quality but reasonably priced photo book… or five.
I’ve picked through a thousand SOOC (straight out of camera, for those of you who don’t follow Mrs. Avocado’s blog) photos and chosen about a hundred favorites, and our photographer is editing them as we speak. I want to put together a wedding scrapbook for our peeps who couldn’t make it to the actual shindig to peruse, plus a couple of keepsake albums for each of our parents, all in less than a few weeks’ time.
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As an apartment-warming gift for Mr. Bruschetta (and, let’s face it, for me too!), I created a coffee table book of our engagement pictures using Shutterfly. Sister Bruschetta had recommended the site after her experience arranging her own engagement pictures in a similar keepsake.
Sifting through the 600+ photos we received from our photographer was the first challenge; having complete control over the format and layout was the second. Fortunately, Shutterfly is completely user-friendly, and even though I don’t consider myself particularly design-savvy, I’m very pleased with the finished product.
Our photographer — and her second shooter — captured moments so quickly that some of my favorite shots have I only slight variations among them.
I’m interrupting the Sea Breeze recaps to bring you this special treat - I just couldn’t wait until they were over. I know, I know… jeez woman, wrap it up already! I’m swear I’m trying, but I have so many projects on the go these days, it’s a bit crazy here in SB Land.
One of these million and one projects is our photo books.
After having made one for Pepperpot as part of her MOH thank you gift, I knew that I wanted to create photo books of all our wedding images not just for us, but for our parents, too.
And then I came across this:
Featured on Weddingbee
Unique Wedding Favors
“Add a memorable touch to your wedding with unique favors that match your theme.”
Sure, it might collect a little dust over the years. Yes, it might get relegated to the back of the closet for a while. And you might not pull it out every time a new guest comes over. Still. Get an album. Here’s why I think you should…
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MyPublisher is always having deals and promotions. There’s a $10 off $50+ voucher right now (VAL10) and recently, I made use of the ’buy one get one free’ to produce a quick, affordable album for my cousin and his family while they no doubt wait to receive their pro pics. While there is certainly legitimate value in the very expensive pro-albums as far as image quality and the thickness and durability of their pages, places like MyPublisher offer a great alternative for the poor-bride’s album. Just don’t mark it up with greasy fingerprints! We used one for our wedding guestbook and had the guests sign the pages, and I was pretty happy with how it turned out.
Create the honeymoon of your dreams.
We used Blurb to make the books. This was the second time I have used them — the first being a wedding gift to my bridesmaid Becka and her husband of photos I took at their wedding after their photographer flaked out on them back in spring 2007. This time I used a couple of Blurb’s newest options: their thicker paper and the ImageWrap hardcover.
I was really happy with the way the books came out. Here is the front (on the right) and back (on the left) of the book. The back was just a mirror image of the picture on the front.
A week or so ago I told you I finally broke down and decided to make my own wedding albums — for my parents, my in-laws and for us. Well — the parent and in-law albums are done just in time for Christmas!!
You asked to see the finished project and I’m so excited to share it with you. I was surprised at how easy it was once I got started. The most time consuming part was choosing the images. I placed a large order from mpix.com. They arrived quickly and the quality was great. This is the second time I’ve ordered from them and both times I was very happy with the product.
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Almost nine months ago I posted about procrastinating on making a wedding album. There are a million excuses, but the bottom line now is that $1000+ for a professional album just isn’t in the budget. We just got our hi-res photos from our photographers in October and with Christmas fast approaching, I decided to use that deadline as motivation to get me started.
Over the weekend Mr. Onion and I headed to Kate’s Paperie and bought one of each of these beautiful albums. I really love them. One for my mother-in-law, one for my mother and the large one for our album. I was hoping to find brown photo corners on-line (what can’t you get on-line these days?), but I’ve met with defeat. I decided to settle on a combination of Kraft colored corners and clear corners (per Miss Hot Cocoa’s recommendation).
I know I made noise about making a Kolo Album for our parents for Christmas, but in the end, I just couldn’t choose only 30 pictures to include in the album, so I went the Blurb route instead. I considered an Mpix assembled album for a while, which I’m sure makes much higher quality albums, but the $200+ price tag (times 3, for 3 sets of parents) turned me off a bit. Blurb’s free book making software was easy to use and in less than a week the books arrived at our doorstep! I thought I’d pass on a few things I learned about Blurb’s books. I chose the hardcover ImageWrap option and premium paper.
I’m the ultimate procrastinator. I wouldn’t say time is running out quite yet to make parents albums for Christmas, but before you know it, it’ll be December 25th and that album you promised to design and make for your parents or grandparents is nonexistent. For me, the dilemma was different: I really wanted to make a Blurb or Mpix album, but I swore if I had to stare at a computer screen any more than the 12 hours a day I already do so, I was going to go insane.
After seeing Mrs. Cherry Pie assemble her b-pics album with a Kolo and photo corners, I thought about doing the same for my parents albums. After considering photo cornering and gluing the pictures into the albums, Mrs. Lemon turned me on to the Kolo “Riva” album.
Since the pouring of the shower and the two amazing weddings, we’ve accumulated a massive amount of well wishes from friends and family. We haven’t had a moment of free time to go through them because our honeymoon followed right after our wedding, so it was a super sweet treat to have something to look forward to reading together when we returned.
This is only half of our pile…I still have some from our shower in another bag.
After receiving some comments that confused the heck out of me on my last post, I decided to re-read my post. As it turns out, Ms. Cream Puff is NOT THAT BRIGHT. Half of my post somehow got deleted before I posted it! So let’s try this again. The pink thing is my PHOTO ALBUM, not my invitations.
Back to Friday–I finally picked up my letterpressed invites from the printer. However, I also stopped by Paper Source, where my manager, Schbvonne, had the album she had created for Mr. Cream Puff and I. It is MAGNIFICENT. My excitement about the invitations was totally dwarfed by my excitement about the album. Now I am sad, because you guys all thought the album was my invitation, and my invitation is not nearly as cool as the album. You will all be disappointed by my invitations!!! Oh well, I guess. What’s a dense puff to do? Not too much at this point!
Anyway, so here is the album.
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My manager at Paper Source has started making beautiful, handcrafted photo albums for people. She offered to make me one as a wedding gift, which is super awesome of her, especially after I saw one (it was gorgeous!). It brought up a question for me, though:
Would we use it?
Mr. Cream Puff and I are so digital. We never have pictures printed. We both have flickr accounts for our photos, and if we want to share them some other way, we email them to people. Heck, my tivo even allows us to stream our photos onto our TV if guests come over and want a slideshow.
Furthermore, we are trying to decrease the amount of “stuff” we have. I used to scrapbook a lot, but I never look at the scrapbooks anymore. They just sit there and collect dust; soon, they will likely move into a box in the basement, where they will sit and take up space. We have a lot of things like that, which is why I have been doing a constant deep cleanse of our house, trying to get rid of stuff we don’t actually need.
So really, do we want or need a photo album?
What do you guys think? Are any of you super digital or trying to create a life less filled with clutter?
Like Mrs. Bee, we haven’t ordered our wedding photo album yet. We were married almost 7 months ago and for the last few months our 1900+ photo proofs have been sitting our our sideboard waiting for me to prioritize them.
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