The past couple of years I have tuned into my creative nature and love for graphic design (on an amateur level of course) and spent hours upon hours creating my own family Christmas card in Adobe Photoshop. The task itself is a bit time consuming, resizing and reformatting pictures to be the correct size but great enough quality to show the awesome pictures. And then there is the process of loading the Adobe Photoshop file into whichever service you plan on using to print your cards, which last year was the most frustrating part of my Christmas card experience.
Last week however, on Monday a friend of mine that I go to church with agreed to take our Christmas pictures with Eli, she did his new born pictures as well. Bianca took the pictures on Monday morning and by Monday evening she had sent me the link to Elijah’s own web page through www.shutterfly.com that had all of our family pictures! If you would like to view some of these amazing pictures you can find them at www.elijahkimberlin.shutterfly.com. The next day I loaded all the pictures from the shutterfly.com page she had created into my own shutterfly.com account and from there made a Christmas card within 15 minutes! And ten of those minutes were spend trying to decide on just one of their Christmas cards!
I won’t tell you yet which Christmas card I have chosen but a couple of my favorites are below; feel free to help me decide.
1. With Love Chartreuse Christmas: http://www.shutterfly.com/cards-stationery/cards-stationery/with-love-chartreuse-christmas-5x7-folded-card?sortType=1&storeNode=93496
2. Many Merry Memories Christmas: http://www.shutterfly.com/cards-stationery/cards-stationery/many-merry-memories-christmas-4x8-photo-card-4x8-photo?sortType=2&storeNode=93496
3. Merry Modern Collage Christmas: http://www.shutterfly.com/cards-stationery/cards-stationery/merry-modern-collage-christmas-card?sortType=1&storeNode=93496
Also, besides Christmas cards shutterfly.com does so much more! I have already done two photo books and I am working on a third. The photo books have been amazing! I have one from mine & John’s trip to Italy celebrating our 5th Wedding Anniversary and one from the first months of Eli’s life celebrating his birth. They are so beautiful and shutterfly.com even sent me a replacement when my Italy book was torn. For Eli’s book all I had to do was upload the pictures and shutterfly.com actually organized them for me into a photo book layout. Caring for a new born, I was thankful to have so much of the work done for me.
Like our Christmas card from last year I spent several days (maybe even weeks) working on Eli’s birth announcement, by the time I ordered them and got them in Eli was already 3 months old. I wish I had made Eli’s birth announcements from shutterfly.com; they have some many super cute ones... http://www.shutterfly.com/cards-stationery/birth-announcements/baby-boy-birth-announcements?c=60375&sortType=1&pageNumber=1&foType=a&fa=8&DCL=true. I love the ones with multiple pictures because we could never narrow down Eli’s pictures to one. And because his new born pictures were already on a shutterfly.com share cite I could have made it in about 10 minutes! Think of all the naps I could have gotten in, instead of working.
So, there you have it! I hope that even if you don’t go to shutterfly.com to get your Christmas cards you will look into how great their service is! I am working on getting all of my pictures into my shutterfly.com account. After my computer crashed last year I almost lost all of them, but on shutterfly.com I can not only store them but create a share page for family to see new pictures of Eli. Which is great considering John’s brother & family is in El Paso, and John’s sister who just returned from Afghanistan is now in Georgia. She hasn’t even met Eli yet but has been able to see all his pictures!
So go shutter crazy! (MAKE SURE YOU CLICK ON THE PICTURES POSTED TO SEE THE FULL PICTURE).
