A Personalized ABC book

I had a $20 promotional gift card to Shutterfly expiring this week and I decided on a whim to make an ABC book for my family.

I love the way it turned out! After all, why settle for generic when you can have B is for these boots:

1) I started by mentally flipping through pictures I’d taken in years past to fill in lots of the letters. “S” is for a gorgeous sunset shot from our trip to Fiji. “R” is for Scott running a marathon. Etc.

2) Then I jotted down the letters I was still short on pictures for, and let those mull in the back of my mind for the better part of the day. My goal was 2-5 pictures for each letter.

3) I took 30 minutes and corralled the girls to help me snap pictures of everything I had come up with that we had on hand for those letters (an elbow, an avocado, etc.)

4) I filled in the few remaining gaps from free shots from google image search.

Some of my favorites:

P is for pregnant:

Q is for quilt:

R is for rainbow:

S is for swimsuit:

… and sleep:

T is for tree:

… and toes:

… and tongue:

U is for umbrella:

and Y is for yawn:

I’m not very crafty (even digitally) so the layouts were pretty simple. Thankfully shutterfly makes this part as fast and painless as possible, though I did go in and tweak things occasionally. Here’s a sample spread:

Yes, that’s an N is for nakey in there. You can’t buy that in stores, people. 🙂

I had to rein in my perfectionist tendencies and just whip this out in two afternoons because if I had allowed myself to deep end on the details of the layout or fuss with picture quality too much, it would have sucked the fun right out of it for me. I’m learning that my discretionary time is fleeting and precious in this season of life and I’m happiest when I spend it on the intersection of that which builds up my family and that which builds up me personally.

I’m hoping the quality on the final product is comparable to Blurb. I’ve been thrilled with all books I’ve ordered through them in the past and this is my first try with Shutterfly.

I know my kids will love it regardless, though!

Two of the many magical things about young children: They delight easily in the simplest things, and they have no basis for comparison. Case in point: I am the best pancake-maker they know because I can make hearts and stars. 🙂