Speaking of Packages...

(This was written last week prior to my loss of Hero and was originally slated to be posted Monday)

I have been working on a little project. I ran across the idea while reading a fellow horse blogger's posts. It is called Blurb. And I am addicted.

When I got home from work Tuesday of last week I found this nice little surprise waiting for me on my door step.

(I apologize in advance for the really crappy quality of these hastily shot cell phone pictures)

Ooooh...shiny package!!! Must.Open.It.Now.

Only I couldn't because it was feeding time at the zoo...err...I mean at home and I didn't want any grubby little baby finger prints all over it. So I showed a small amount of restraint and waited to open it until he went to bed an hour later.

What is Blurb? It is an online book creating/publishing/printing company. You can make just about anything: novel, magazine, picture book etc... You can link to Amazon to sell it and even create an e-book for personal use or to sell. But what really caught my attention was the ability to make a book out of your blog. What an amazing idea!! I could have all my writings, all my pictures, all my memories in a nice shiny book.

I mentioned it to the hubs that I was going to play around with it for this blog and he countered by asking if I could make a book out of my first blog because he likes to go back and read it from time to time and he thinks it would be great to allow W to read it some day when he is old enough to understand.

Since that blog was much shorter (I think 60 entries total) with only a handful of pictures strewn through it, I figured it would be a much easier project than this beast of a blog.

The software is free to download and has different options for size of book, hard cover, soft cover etc... and a plethora of color, font and style choices. One option is to just have them import your blog for you and create the book that way. I tried that first to see what would happen. It is a nice feature since it imports in not only every post, but also associates the pictures with it as well, but I didn't like the layout at all and ended up having to redo it myself. The only issue I kept running into was that my picture quality was sub optimal and I couldn't make the pictures as large as I wanted due to poor quality when printed.

8 hours later I had a book created. I played around with the font and style and background a ton and eventually settled on a nice 8"x10" soft cover book.

Front Cover

Better view of front cover



Inside

I really like how it turned out. It looks pretty professional. I'm not sure I would go with the blue paper the entire way through again, but the hubs loves it.

It didn't cost a fortune, around $50 total with shipping and all. It all depends on the style, size, number of pages and paper quality you choose. The turn around time was fantastic. I could have gotten it in a week if I wanted to pay $15 in shipping. The lowest shipping still got it to me in 2 weeks time from placing the order. I am thrilled with it.

I have been working on making a book out of this blog mostly to have all the picture printed. I am going to have to chop it into various volumes though due to the number of posts and pictures. They sent me a 15% off coupon on my next order, so hopefully I can order my Gemmie book soon.

Then as if that wasn't enough to make my night, I opened an envelope to find this in it:

My Ride and Tie membership card along with a really nice pin!!! I was really excited :)