I have spent a lot of time over at Shutterfly over the last few days! They have a whole bunch of new products for us digital scrapbookers and some of the prices are so right on! I thought I would try out a few of their new services (especially since I got some freebies), so I thought I would share my feelings on those!
I tried both the 12x12 and 8x8 prints. The quality is just gorgeous!!! The 8x8 print will go in my book and the 12x12 is going to be framed. Uploading and printing them was easy as pie, you just log on to Shutterfly's digital scrapbooking page, choose "Print your Digital Scrapbook Pages" and go from there. Nice and easy and as I said before, the prints are just beautiful! The prices were a teeny bit high though... $6.99 for a 12x12 and $3.49 for 8x8, their photo books were a much better deal in my opinion.
I decided to use their 5x7 photo cards for my Christmas cards this year but I haven't sent them out to anyone yet (hoping to be able to stick my new address in them!) so I don't want to share them here yet. I had a really really hard time with the photo cards all stemming from the fact that I thought they were cards... like.. .with an opening...
Now that they've arrived I see they are more postcard style, it's basically just a 5x7 picture with an envelope. So now that I have them home I realize I pretty much need to mount them on cardstock and make a card out of them which is extra work I wasn't planning on. I designed my card vertical and could not figure out how to get the template to show my picture vertical so then I tried to figure how a horizontal card would open and just rotated my picture and put it on the card sidewaays... again, since they didn't actually open, this was a huge waste of time on my part. I probably wouldn't order these again.
8.5 x 11 Classic Book (using Shutterfly Templates)
I wanted to make a book with my Puerto Vallarta pictures but I didn't have time to scrapbook 20 pages, so I thought I would try out Shutterfly's 8.5x11 books and just use their templates. I loved how easy it was to put the book together and get all my pictures in! I finished the whole book in one night. It arrived tonight and I'm very impressed with the quality, it looks as if some of the pictures (mostly the skintones) are a little dark but other than that, the book is beautiful! Here's what the book cover looks like:
Which brings me to my main gripe... I made a custom cover for this book but because I used their templates, I had to use their default cover options. I was so bummed, I really wish they would allow you to use custom covers when you use their templates. Oh well, classic black works well too!
Here's a preview of the inside pages too:
And finally... almost a year later, I'm actually printing my Hawaii album! I downloaded Shutterfly's templates to make sure none of my text was in any of the bleed area, created a cover, and uploaded my images. Then all I had to do was decide what order everything went in! I'm so excited about being able to create my own cover! Here's what mine looks like:
A 20 page book with a custom cover and everything is only $29.99! Which really makes me question their price for the regular 8x8 pages. In this book, you are basically getting your pages for less than $1.50 a piece, but if you factor in the cost of the cover and binding it's even cheaper.... So how is just a regular page more than twice as much? I don't get....
For my money, I think their books are definitely the way to go! The price is just awesome as is the quality! Can't go wrong here! Will definitely be getting more of these in the future!
House News
Ok, enough Shutterfly chit-chat. Some of you are probably wondering about the home-buying process... I wish I had more news but I really don't.... we're in this big waiting game right now which stinks. The seller apparently submitted some more paperwork on Wednesday and the bank says it will be an additional 2-4 weeks before we hear anything... sigh. I'm afraid with the upcoming holiday it might be even longer. I wish the term "Short Sale" wasn't so deceiving... there is nothing short about it...