botanica

I got an e-mail a couple of weeks ago from Shutterfly, making me an offer that was hard to refuse. Any order would get me a free 8 x 8 Photo Book. This is a $29.99 value! So I ordered some luggage tags featuring photos I've taken. Once my order shipped, the credit for the free Photo Book appeared in my account and they gave me one week to redeem it.

Having wanted to do one of these for quite some time, but being The Queen of Procrastination, I had never gotten around to doing it. Now I had to 'use it or lose it.'

I began by uploading pictures I'd taken of flowers in my garden into a folder on Shutterfly's site. Then I had to load those pictures into my Photo Book project folder. I thought this was going to be the most time-consuming part of the project, and for most people, it just might be, but for me, it was designing the pages.


There are so many options for backgrounds, fonts, layouts, etc., that I had a hard time putting photos on each page and being happy with the results. I can be such a perfectionist when it comes to stuff like this that I drive myself crazy in the process. Of course, this very thing is what contributes to my procrastination habit. But I was not about to lose out on a thirty-dollar book, so I soldiered on, changing backgrounds and pictures and layouts over and over again until I was finally happy with things.

Jenna had done one already and we talked about the steps we took when assembling our books. She picked her backgrounds first, then the layouts, then the pictures. I chose the layout first, inserted the pictures, then picked a background that coordinated well with the pictures. We took different paths to reach the same destination and we're both happy with each others' results!

I chose the title botanica with the subtitle consisting of the latitude and longitude for "Our Little Acre." I labeled each picture with either the common name or the Latin name and sometimes I used both. Each word throughout the entire book was in "Modern Wide" font using lower case letters exclusively.

The free offer allowed for twenty pages, although you could add more if you wanted, for something like 80 cents each. If I'd had more time, I would have added more photos on additional pages, but as it was, I was right up to the last minute getting this book finished and submitting the order. And I'm not kidding. The offer expired at midnight Pacific time, and I hit "Submit" at 11:58!


The book arrived today and I'm very pleased with it! I'm sure I'll do more of these when they offer them again at a reduced price. Perhaps I'll do one for each of the major flower show trips that my mom and I have taken together. I'd also like to do one showing how our gardens have evolved over the years.