Two books in the works

I haven't posted for a while.  The time has just slipped away.  I am not sure where it went.  We had a great Thanksgiving at my sister-in-law's house and, while I enjoy hosting the Thanksgiving dinners, I did enjoy the break this year.  I have also enjoyed not having to work at my job for most of this week.  I like my job, but I have enjoyed the break.  Of course, I had hoped to accomplish thousands of things.  Perhaps I had my heart set on too many things because I have just a few of those hoped-for things done.

I'm working on ancestry photo books for my husband's parents for Christmas and it seems to absorb my time that isn't being absorbed by work, my new calling, L's swimming, general home life, my other kids (my two boys who I probably don't mention in the blog quite as much perhaps because of L and her swimming--which there has been a lot of this month), my husband, and all that seems to come up in the course of the average day.

Shutterfly.com has really come a long way since I did the other big photo book project back in 2009, and there are so many improvements and fun things.  If you received my handout where I wrote how to do a book on Shutterfly, ignore about 80% of it.  Some of it is still true--ALWAYS decide on the picture placement before typing one word of text, and the text still doesn't scroll page to page or column to column--but the whole process of putting a book together on Shutterfly has become so much better.

One new item available on Shutterfly is to design your own book from the ground up.  Of course, I chose that this time around.  And, of course, it taps into my OCD side and I'm having a difficult time keeping a narrow focus (e.g., I've changed the backgrounds numerous times, added multiple embellishments, changed the page order around, changed the cover several times, changed the font so many times that I can't always remember from page to page which font I'm using for which text boxes, added pages only to delete them, etc.).  I think I have the format down now and just need to forge ahead.  My father-in-law's book is the nearest to completion.  I can see the end in sight.  I think my mother-in-law's book will come together pretty rapidly since I did all the format dithering on my father-in-law's book and have now reached certain decisions.

I opted to do two different books because I just could not figure out how to have the subject matter flow.   It doesn't take long, going backwards up a family tree, to have a lot of people to categorize.  Just because I put them in some kind of order doesn't mean the reader will automatically "sense" the order and figure out how, for example, my father-in-law on page 1 is related to the people on page 25.

I have pictures for each of their four generations, some for their fifth generation and one for a sixth generation  (some pictures are better than others) and I have multiple pictures for some of their ancestors.  Part of my dithering has been trying to find even MORE pictures to add to this book.  I have made it a hobby since I married into the family to collect these pictures, except to call it a "hobby" really makes it seem far more casual than it has been.

I am so excited because I have found some pictures that my in-laws have never seen before!  I've found about a dozen pictures this fall, primarily at dupinternational.org on its photo index.  They are good quality pictures.  I have also collected (back when I first came into the family and had my own income and no children) many pictures from the DUP in St. George.  However, the pictures I recently ordered from the St. George DUP were very poor quality compared to the awesome pictures I purchased there about twenty years ago.  (Can I be old enough to have done anything like that twenty years ago? Whenever I refer to some past even in my life in terms of multiple decades, I'm taken aback.)

When I finish these books, I will have to post pictures of the book here on the blog.  I usually can't reach my own back to pat it but I really think these will be nice gifts for Christmas if I can finish them on time.