Photo Books with Shutterfly

For almost LE's first year of life, I put together photo books every two months or so with Shutterfly. We switched from Blurb books due to the quality and ease of making the books. Blurb's system was way too buggy for Macs when I made the switch (which is rumored to be fixed now).

With Shutterfly, it is easy to make the layouts in InDesign and upload the jpegs into a blank book. They have layout options for those who don't have design programs or who want to use the cute designs that they prepare for you. The issue I had was when I wanted to add photos in a certain way and wasn't able to change it up the way I wanted.

Inside look at one of the books we did using Shutterfly's design

Recently, Shutterfly made their online system completely customizable. You can go on their website, use their designs, and completely manipulate the photo layouts to however you want. It's a great option for those who don't want to start from scratch but have an opinion on how they want it done.

Of course, Shutterfly has products other than photo books. I've used them for their photo prints picked up at Target (same quality as places like Walmart and Snapfish); greeting cards; baptism invites; Christmas cards; and large poster prints for a banquet. Quite honestly, Shutterfly's designs and card quality aren't my favorite; I prefer to use Tiny Prints for that, though, interestingly, Shutterfly did just acquire Tiny Prints this year.

Baptism Invite

Christmas Card 2010

I must say that my favorite part about Shutterfly is their customer relations. They give promo codes galor and have great on-site sales. I've also called customer service multiple times, and I have nothing but good things to say about their customer service.

Speaking of promos... though all of these opinions are my own, Shutterfly has offered me one free photo book in exchange for a blog post. 

You Are My Sunshine Freebie

You've all heard the song, read the phrase, and seen it on a million prints in kids' rooms tours across the blogosphere. You'd think it'd be tired, but there's something about that tune that gets me singing it to LE without realizing it. After many rainy days this spring and a newly gifted Silhouette from my parents (!), I knew that I wanted to create some sort of design for LE to wear.

I bought a couple of plain white long-sleeve shirts on clearance at Target and a pair of yellow striped pants at a garage sale. Then I used Illustrator to create this design:

After I had it all cut out with the Silhouette, I noticed that the cursive "are my" font was way too thin for the material. I had to scrap those words and change it to the same cursive as "when skies...."

It seems as though at some places, I knew that you shouldn't put a color over another color with iron-ons, especially the flocked iron-on material that I bought from Silhouette. In other places, I didn't keep that in mind; I had to use scissors to cut out pieces of the yellow sun.

I wanted to share the design with you to create your own shirts or whatever you want. I went back to Illustrator to fix the errors, and the design now looks like this:

I saved it as a Silhouette file that should be really easy for you to use. All of the gray is grouped and all of the yellow is grouped together. Place the appropriate grouping on the artboard and cut each grouping one at a time. It's already mirrored so that you don't have to worry to remember to do that for cutting.

If you want to resize the image, to get them both the same size, you should place them both in the same area and resize them together. 

When it comes time to apply to your shirt, it should be really easy to figure out how to put them together since they fit much like a puzzle.

If you have issues or questions, let me know! I hope you enjoy it! (File links are below)

Click on the link to get directed to YouSendIt or Google to download:

Yousendit (good until August 17, 2012)

Google (must sign up for google)

Email me at any date and I'll send it to you-- no spam, pop-ups, ads... can't beat it! :)

Summer On-the-Road Survival Kit + Free Paper City Printables

LE and I are spending more and more time away from the house now that the sun has decided to stick around Madison. There are a few extra things to keep in the car for impromptu park visits, outdoor naps, and play stops.  Since John and I switch cars back and forth a fair amount in the warmer months (we both prefer the one with the sun roof), we needed a solution to make the switch easy.

My favorite way of keeping things organized with all of the extra stuff for LE during road trips is by using a big clear plastic bin, labeled with the contents inside the lid. While we're away from the home, we use the bin as her play center and then when it's time to go, we can always make sure that we leave with everything that we arrived with.

It only made sense to create a bin to transfer from car to car. filled with  the summer surplus. That way, we'll always have our Summer On-the-Road Survival Kit with us without going through the effort of taking out everything one by one.

Here's what our kit includes:

• small blanket to cover the grass for picnics or outdoor naps
• towel for after we splash in the water or get dirty
• swim diaper-- you never know if the splash pad calls our name when we're out
• sunscreen
• first aid kit
• point & shoot digital camera
• snacks
• umbrella to shield the sun at picnics or naps
• book 
• token toy
• bucket
• insect repellent wipes
• diaper clutch
• sunhat

What would you put in yours?

If LE were a year or two older, I'd be inclined to keep paper cities with us, too. Not just for the summer, but really any time that there's a possibility of being away from the home with limited entertainment.

Have you seen the paper cities at Made by Joel? He has free printouts for cities, people, helicopters, cars, etc. The kids color them in, cut them out (or you do), crease them to get it to stand, and then they have a super portable city to play with! He has a lot of inexpensive, creative ideas for imaginative play time. You should go check it out if you haven't already.

All paper city photos are from the Made by Joel website.


Here's where I linked up!

Summer {Free} Printable

We got our patio installed yesterday and today, which means that summer can officially begin in our household! I'm definitely looking forward to a little bit of outdoor living space that is level with our backyard for LE's sake. Right now she's not a huge fan of grass, so the patio and rocks that are surrounding part of it will make a great outdoor play area for her.

We're also looking forward to having some great evening meals out there and hopefully some excellent s'mores are in our near future! For today, we'll have to make do with the few cookies leftover from the batch that I made for the workers. They are a respectable substitute for now-- definitely my favorite chocolate cookie to make, though a bit too chocolatey for a certain male somebody in this house. For the adult female in this house, they're just right. (If you are interested in these cookies... see the recipe post)

In honor of our patio and summer and all things NOT Wisconsin winter related... I created a printable that you are welcome to use! I did a little browsing of my favorite sites for summer printables, and while printables are a plenty, they are mostly themed graduation, dad, or mom as opposed to just summer.

Click on the thumbnail and then click "Download" on the lefthand side to get the full-size image. It's formatted to print on 8.5x11 and fit a 8x10 frame!

Please, printable is for personal use only!!