Another stocking and another photo album

I started a stocking for Baby #6 (aka Phoebe) on the drive out to see my sister on Thursday morning. I finished it (more or less) this evening, which has to be some kind of stocking-knitting record! I still need to put her name on it (but, to be fair, I still have to put Alexander's name on his stocking and he's almost four). I just thought that with the baby coming so soon before Christmas and with all the other busyness we have going on in our lives (between school and work and other kids and things) that if I was going to have a matching stocking for this baby that now was the time to do it. So I did it!

Then this morning I got a Shutterfly code for a free book and knew I had to throw one of those together, too! The problem was that I wasn't sure what theme to do for it. All the kids have their 1-year baby book now, I've done Christmas and Halloween and family photos and haven't really amassed enough pictures to do another book like that... 

I've already not leapt at the opportunity for a free book a time or two this past couple of years because I simply didn't feel like I had the time to put anything together or couldn't come up with a theme, so I was really please when I came up with the idea to make colour books. At first I thought I would do a red spread, then an orange spread, then a yellow spread, and so on down through the rainbow, but trying to pick only a handful of red photographs was so difficult that I decided to do a red volume. Then I'm all set for next time I get a coupon because I know I'll be doing the orange volume. 

Shutterfly recently redid their interface and...I don't love it. I found it very difficult to work with (I can't zoom in, for one thing, and I feel like I have far less control than I used to; like, they tried to make it all "automatic" but then...what about my vision?). So while I like how the cover turned out, the guts are...not exactly as I'd like them.

But with these books my motto is: Some printed pictures is better than no printed pictures.

They don't have to be perfect. 

The kids all enjoy looking at them and remembering things and thinking about how cute they are (I enjoy it, too). Of course, Phoebe completely missed out on The Red Album, but we can always make a Red Album, vol. 2 and add her in later. She won't be in a lot of our photo books (Alexander suffers from the same fate, and Zoë a little less, etc. etc.) 

Now that I have those two projects out of the way I can move on to the million other projects I need to do in the next little while before the next semester starts...