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Memory Books Without the Camera

© Anna Morvee

If any of you are like me, we don't take all the photos we want of our kids or on vacations. Sometimes the film gets ruined, lost, or just goes into that void where the lost socks are. With the introduction of Digital Cameras life has become much easier for getting those priceless shots, but batteries die, pictures come out awful or you just forgot to take that shot.

I have been keeping Memory books of my kids for years. What inspired this project was my oldest daughter when she came to visit. We had taken all the snap shots, but unfortunately, the film disappeared into the lost void.

So, I started doing some brainstorming. My goal was to recreate the most accurate memory book of her visit possible. Then the light bulb went off! Here's what we did and we had a lot of fun with it.

First, we wrote down all the activities we had done during her visit. Then we wrote down special bits of conversations, tid-bits and feelings of the visit. As we worked on the book, it began to grow with a life of its own.

After we had gathered all that information, it was time to do something with it. We got on the Internet and found pictures of the places we went. We located clip art from clip art sites and off cd's I had. Once we had all the pictures together, it was time to put the events with the pictures.

We opened up a program like Print Artist or Create-A-Card, however any publishing program will work fine. We organized the book chronologically and began adding borders and pictures. I wanted this to be personal so we agreed that all the captions and funny little sayings would be hand written. This took a couple of days to assemble and the whole family helped. At that time, I didn't have a binder and going to the nearest office supply store was a bit far, we had to come up with an alternative way to bind the book. We had several options, one was buy a binder and page protectors, and another idea was to use contact paper to protect the pages. We chose to use the contact paper route. I had that on hand, it is inexpensive and holds up pretty good. Finally, we bound the book. I used a paper punch and made six holes, where we could thread ribbon through. As a final touch, I sewed a button on the front and attached matching ribbon that way the book could be closed and it would keep much longer.

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