Last-minute Gift Ideas: Keepsake Books from Scrapblog

Ever since the advent of digital photography, our photo albums have fallen by the wayside. That's why every year I like to take a select group of photos and create a keepsake photo book. After all, forcing your guests to click through thousands and thousands of your photos just isn't the same as leafing through the crisp pages of a book filled with treasured memories. It's short and sweet and a wonderful keepsake. It also makes a great present -- just think of a keepsake book filled with photos of the grandchildren, or photos of a trip you took together with a good friend.

I have to admit, most of my keepsake books haven't really been too fancy, just photos with a plain background. I'd love to give my books a bit of flair, but I'm intimidated by the the frills and complications of all the digital scrapbook sites I see. It takes me long enough just to select the photos!

So when Scrapblog, an online scrapbooking site, told me their site has an easy way to create scrapbook pages, I jumped at the chance to try it. They invited me to create a personalized album, and it's true: anyone can scrapbook, with almost no effort at all! With their Quick Mix tool, I was able to do it in 3 steps:


Step 1: Select a kit. Choose from a wide variety of themed pages to use. All the layouts are done for you so you don't need to fiddle with cropping and backgrounds and stickers and all the things that scrapbookers do (but all the things that last-minute gift givers don't have time for!):



Step 2: Choose photos. You select a bunch of photos that you want to include in your scrapbook pages. You can upload from your computer or use photos you have stored in various online accounts like Flickr, Facebook, Photobucket and more. Having the online option was really valuable to me because I hate spending time uploading photos that are already online on another account!


Step 3: That's It. The Quick Mix tool will populate the scrapbook pages with your selected photos. It figures out which ones are the landscape ones and which ones are the portrait ones! The photo below is an actual page from the scrapbook I've created. I'm doing a Keepsake Book of our trip to the Grand Canyon. I'm very please with how it's turning out, and I can't wait to receive it!


If you want more pages, you can add them with a single click. Don't like the way Quick Mix paired two photos together? You can switch them easily. Don't want captions? Delete the caption box.

And beware: since it takes, like, zero time to create the page layouts, you can actually spend a lot of time customizing them: adding stickers here, adding text there, switching photos around, changing the backgrounds, and all that. I have to admit, it's so much fun, I did a bit of customizing myself!. You don't even need to use the Quick Mix tool to create your scrapbook pages. You can stick the photos in yourself, using premade layouts, or if you're an experienced scrapbooker, you can create your pages from scratch.

When you have all the scrapbook pages you want, you can compile them in the hardcover Keepsake Book, a softcover book, a calendar, or greeting cards. You can even buy the finished pages and print them yourself.


Scrapbook prides itself on a quick turnaround time: orders ship within 2 to 3 business days. Which means, even with all the holiday rush, you can still order them in time for Christmas! Order by today, December 16 and select FedEx 2-day delivery, or order by tomorrow, December 17 and select FedEx overnight shipping, and they'll arrive by December 24th. And to help offset the cost of expedited shipping, here are some discount codes you can enter when checking out:

* Enter code CAL2010 to save 25% off wall calendar orders

* Enter code HOLIDAY25 to save 25% off your order


Win It!
I'll be giving away a Scrapblog Keepsake Book to one lucky Bonggamom Finds reader in my upcoming 12 Days of Christmas Giveaways event. Keep coming back to Bonggamom Finds, or subscribe to my updates, so you'll know when this giveaway starts!

I will be receiving a sample from this company to use in a future review. The views and opinions expressed here are my own.