Kenya Photo Book

(The photo book featured in this post was provided free of charge by MPix for me to review. Thoughts and opinions are my own.)

About two years ago Jordan and I took an amazing trip to Kenya. At the time Jordan's sister Karith was living in Nairobi (now she lives with us!). We spent a couple days exploring Nairobi and a few amazing days on Safari. Jordan and Karith also climbed Mount Kenya before I arrived. (See here for more details about the trip.) I'm sure you can imagine we had a lot of photos when we returned!

After scrapping several trips and occasions with lots of photos, I've found giving the experience a bit of distance can help in focusing in on the photos I really want to include. Often if I make the scrapbook right away, I include way too many photos, and when I look back at it years later it feels a bit overdone. But of course you don't want to wait too long and not do it!

My main problem with waiting is that I have a weird fear that I'm going to run out of scrapbooking projects, and so I don't start them. Is this just me? It's such a weird thing to worry about. I guess I'm saving them for a rainy day, but the great thing about actually getting a book like this finished and printed is that it's so inspiring to work on more! I've dusted off an old project from our trip to Taiwan that I've started updating.

Anyway, enough about my weird project hoarding (although do let me know if you relate to this, I feel real weird about it). This book turned out super awesome! I knew from the beginning that I wanted to mix scrapbook pages with large photo pages. And seeing it now in print looks even better than I thought it would. I will for sure be doing this again in the future. Honestly, it felt a bit strange looking at it on my screen, but seeing it in print is amazing. The paper quality is excellent and really makes the photos stand out. Plus mixing pages like this obviously cuts down on the time you need to scrap, and emphasizes the amazing photos. The way I scrap can distract quite a lot from the photos, and I'm not really interested in a more minimal, photo-focused scrapping, so this is a great way for me to get the best of both worlds.

Mpix.com, who I've worked with for years now, has an awesome new photo cover option for their premium photo books (this is the 10x10 version). My big decision will be come the new year if I continue with my traditional black cover for my pocket page book, or go in for the flashy photo cover. Dilemmas for another day.

I've filmed a quick flip through of my book if you're interested or you can see all the pages here, including the large photo pages. If you're interested in more details on the scrap pages, I've uploaded them all to my gallery. I used a variety of kits and bundles for this project, which is initially what started my Mix & Match idea. Every page was also started with a template. It's really a lot easier to finish a project like this if you use a layout template. I see why people like them so much. Ten years into this hobby, and still learning new things! Thanks to Elif for her awesome layout templates. Ones available on DigitalScrapbook.com are linked to their respective pages.

Mpix is having a sale on foil pressed greeting cards through the end of October, a great opporunity to get your holiday cards a bit ahead of the rush. They printed our baby announcement at the beginning of the year and it was lovely.

Thanks for looking!