New Things Coming

I'm looking forward to April

Mar 18, 2025

Newsletter Updates and an Announcement Coming Soon

Hi Everyone! I have a few updates that I wanted to share. First, I wanted to let you know that I’ll be using Substack for my newsletter and website going forward. You won’t need to do anything to keep receiving my newsletters, but now you will be able to go to my Substack page and see all my past content. That will allow you to have several ways of keeping up with me; through my newsletter that will come to your email box, through my Substack site at karenchrismandesigns.substack.com or by using the Substack app. As always, if you wish to longer receive my updates, there is an unsubscribe button below.

Another exciting thing is I’ll be opening a new shop during the first week of April. An announcement with all the details will be coming soon. I’ve been working on a brand new collection and can’t wait to share it with you.

My Winter Project: Family Photo Books

I love digital scrapbooking. I ventured into it because of my love of photography. It’s such a joy to tell stories and make something beautiful out of the hundreds of photos that I take. Out of all my scrapbooking projects, I find making yearly photo books the most fulfilling. I love being able to flip though the pages and see the blessing of the year. I’m not going to lie and say that I’m all caught and up to date with them. Actually, I’m very behind. But I’ve decided it is totally worth the effort to go back and create books for past years. I spent this January and February putting together four different books.

I have found that the key to not getting too bogged down when making yearly books is keeping the template and elements simple. I’ve created templates that make it easy to put together pages no matter what the orientation of your photos. Those templates will be available again when my new shop is open in April.

Since I had so many books to print, I shopped around with coupons and ended up using three different printers. Below are the three printers that I used and a few thoughts about each one.

Blurb: Not only did I print three year books, but I also printed several years worth of digital layouts. 256 to be exact! I’ve found that for very large books, Blurb is a good value resulting in a lovely book. To make my 12x12 pages fit their 8x10 landscape book, I made a photoshop template where I resized all my pages to approximately 7.25 x 7.25 and included a textured white background underneath the scrapbook page adding a shadow to each layout. I borrowed this idea from Lynn Grieveson and really love how it turns out. Having the white background underneath the layouts as a border helps the pages flow together even though there are a variety of colors and themes on each page. Below you can see a few of the pages from my blurb book. Each layout is centered on the page with a textured white paper underneath.

Mixbook: The next printer I tried was Mixbook. I used a coupon for 30% off, but have since gotten coupons in my email for 50% off. I feel like this was the most expensive option of the printers I tried, but the book did turn out really nice.

Shutterfly: I ended up doing two of my year books with Shutterfly. I used different coupons and options with each one. I upgrade all of the books to the professional 6 color printing. My favorite book with them was using the lay flat pages option. The printing quality was really nice with the upgraded printing. Also, using the unlimited pages coupon made it a good value.

Shutterfly photo book with lay flat binding

The book where I didn’t use lay flat pages is not my favorite because the photos are too close to the gutter of the book. Next time I will leave more white space in the gutter, or be sure and use the lay flat pages option.

Shutterfly photo book without lay flat pages

I think that’s it for today! Please watch your inbox the first week of April for information about my new shop and collection. Thank you so much for reading and I’m looking forward to connection with you again soon!