Pages We've Turned: Volume 1

After almost exactly one month from start until completion, my book arrived today. I first looked at blurb.com's website on August 15th (I only remember that date because my dad was here and I was looking at it while he and Kelly were out in the garage doing something) and my book arrived today on September 16th. It took me about a week to get the majority of the book done. Then I took a week long break from it because I was sick of looking at it and tired of the software running excruciatingly slow on my computer. The third week was spent finishing up the last few pages, proofreading and looking through it multiple times, and agonizing over the title. I finally ordered it and it took a week and a half to print and ship.

I ended up going with Pages We've Turned for the title. Not just because it won in my poll, but I do appreciate the opinions. I honestly liked both potential titles and had a hard time deciding. I was leaning toward using Pages We've Turned but what cemented me was a comment that my friend Amy made on my blog. She made a comment stating which title she liked. When I read her comment, for some reason, I clicked on her name and it took me to her blogger profile. I looked at the blogs that she follows and the second one was called 1000 Words. So that made the name Worth A Thousand Words seem too common for me and I went with Pages We've Turned. So if you read this Amy, thank you!

When I submitted my order with Blurb, I felt excited and nervous. I told Kelly it's like studying really hard for a test in college. You leave the exam feeling really good, like you nailed it. Then a week goes by and you get the test back and made a bunch of stupid mistakes and didn't do that well. I was worried that when I got the book, I would dislike a bunch of things about it or make some really dumb errors that would drive me crazy for the rest of my life. So I was pretty nervous to open it today when I got it.

Overall, I'm very happy with the book. It is a very nice quality. I got the hard cover with image wrap, meaning there is no annoying dust jacket to get torn, the image and words are printed directly on the cover. Right away, there were a few things that I would like to change in future volumes but they're not so annoying that I dislike the book. First of all, the page backgrounds were a great, vibrant turquoise color on my computer monitor. When I got the book, they are not turquoise at all, they are baby blue. I wouldn't have picked baby blue but it's not a terrible color. I wanted to make each volume a different color but now I'm not sure if the color is that different in person. I may have to contact Blurb and see if they can send me an example of what the different colors actually look like printed. The second thing I would like to change is the cover. I definitely need to make the title and author much bigger next time. And maybe use a different background than all of the pages or something. It's a little boring. I'm sure I'll find more things to change as I take a closer look at it but those are the two things I noticed right away. Oh well, live and learn.

So here is Pages We've Turned: Volume 1. I choose the largest book, it's 12 inches by 12 inches. Here is the front cover (the deck of cards are just for size comparison).



I chose to go with the 12x12 for two reasons. The first reason is that I want to make a new book each year and line them all up on our entertainment center. The smaller books would look kind of puny up there. The second reason is that the 12x12 had better options for the layouts of all of the pages.



I plan to create future volumes straight from my blog but since I didn't start my blog until June 2008, I backlogged some of the important stuff. I actually started in Oct 2003 with a quick entry about our Maui wedding. Then I sped through the next 4 years in just a couple of pages. I highlighted the main events of Cason's first year and then pretty much followed the blog from then until just before Bryce was born. I figured that was a good stopping point and the next book will begin with my entry on May 17th, 2009. I've been trying to update my blog more often lately so that my next volume will be more complete.



The cool thing about the Blurb book software is that you can use one of their many page layouts or you can design your own. I tried to use a lot of different layouts so that the pages don't all look the same. Here are just a few examples of the pages so you can see that every page is different.







And the back of the book. I thought this picture was appropriate.