I downloaded the Instagram app and started taking snapshots of my daily life while I was in New York visiting with my girlfriends shortly after Paul deployed. On the day Paul came home, I had taken 601 shots. To keep from going crazy that morning, I uploaded all of them to Blurb and then used about 550 of them to make a 230 page 7×7 book.
TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY PAGES.
It arrived while we were on vacation. And it's awesome.
Blurb will auto-fill all the photos for you, but I wanted to create little grids and I wanted a say over what pictures took up a full page, so I took the time to arrange it all myself. It took a few hours and I mostly just followed a chronological order.
Instead of agonizing over photo placement, I just picked my favorites to be full page images and other detail shots to set in a 2×2 grid. On Saturday, after we got home, it was on the doorstep. I opened the package and wrote allllll over it with a black pen.
I didn't think at all about where the text would go or what I would say. I just paged through and wrote when I had something to add. I used an American Crafts Slickwriter to write and that dried well even on the glossy pages.
Some times I just wrote notes about the photos, other times I wrote text about how I was feeling.
This book is my photo diary of a full life while Paul was deployed. I am so happy to have it made and resting on my shelf for when I need a "you got this" pep talk.
heads up – I used an affiliate link to blurb.com throughout this post. Use that link and code 15OFFBLURB to save 15% on your book order. Because the quality of instagram shots isn't always awesome, some of the full page images are a little grainy looking. The book making app told me this would happen and I just ignored it. For me, having the image – poor quality or not – was worth it. The images in the smaller grids are perfect.
This is project 2 of 27. I am attempting to complete 27 craft projects using 27 different materials before I turn 28 on 02.22.13. You can follow my progress here on the blog or on pinterest. Birthday challenges are my favorite. You can see the 26 Projects I completed while 26 here and the 27 materials I have used so far here.
enJOY it 
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