Blurb

Recently I received in the mail a copy of a book I made using blurb.  Blurb is a printing service that you can use to create your own photo books or print books.  One of the best features though, in my opinion, is that you can use it to "slurp" your blog into a book.  Since I've been pretty slack about filling out LP's official baby book, but pretty good at updating my blog, I decided to print all of the entries about my pregnancy and LP's first year in book form. 

I chose a hardback, standard portrait sized (8x10) book with a dust jacket.  You download a simple program to your computer and then just follow the prompts to "slurp" your blog.  You can then go through and edit anything you'd like- I took out a bunch of posts about American Idol, photos I didn't love, etc.  You can create your own cover and really make it look exactly how you want. 

Here's the front cover- I used a piece of artwork I'd created for LP's first birthday as the cover:

And here's the spine: 



The title page:



And some of the interior pages.  They have many different page layouts to choose from, with small photos, large photos, no photos, etc.  I changed the layout throughout depending on what photos I was using.



For blog entries where I shared some digital scrapbook pages I used larger photos:





This is the back flap of the cover.  The front flap is similar but has a photo of me when I was pregnant. 



And the back cover (a digital scrapbook page I made with photos of LP's first year):

All in all, I really love the way this turned out.  Blurb is more expensive than Snapfish or Shutterfly, and they don't seem to have sales or discounts very frequently (unlike both Snapfish and Shutterfly who are almost always having some sort of promotion) but I think the quality is a bit better.  I still love Snapfish and Shutterfly and will continue to use them for photo albums but they don't have the capability of using text from your blog the way that blurb does.  It was literally as easy as just typing in the url for my blog- the program did the rest.  Blurb also has quite a few choices of book size (including an option for just black and white text if you only wanted the text from your blog or wanted to publish something else) and you can choose soft cover, hardcover with a dust jacket, or a hardcover with an image wrap. 

So, LP might not have a fully filled out baby book.  But he WILL have this copy of my blog entries detailing my pregnancy with him and his first year in this world to look at when he's older- which might even be better than a scribbled in baby book with lists of his first words...