Christmas Bags and Tags

I’ve been busy the past couple of days with Christmas decorating, book making and making these:

These bags and tags are pretty easy to make.  I just went over to Staples and picked up some big tags, traced the tags on the back of wrapping paper, cut them out and glued them on one side of the tag.  Then I used stickers and other scrapbook-type elements to decorate the tags.  I did the same thing with some cheap bags I picked up from Michaels.  My family likes to use bags for wrapping because all they have to do is drop the item in the bag and stuff some tissue paper on top.  In the past, they haven’t been very imaginative in their Christmas wrapping…turning their noses up at the colorful rolls of Christmas paper that I dutifully buy after Christmas every year.  They instead go for plain brown or white bags that I have on hand in my craft closet.  They usually just write the name of the recipient right on the bag (making sure we can never use them again for anybody but that person.)  These bags are not very festive, but they do the job.

So, this year I’m helping the helpless out a little  by preparing holiday pre-decorated bags.  There is a method to my madness, though.  Decorated bags look better under the tree (and thus, in my photos) then do ugly bags with names scrawled across them in black marking pen (no offense to any of my family members who might be responsible for the ugly Christmas wrapping.)

When I’m not making bags and tags, I’ve been up to my virtual neck in 2008 family photos.  Every year I make a Family Photo Memory Book using the photos I’ve taken from the year.  I make the books for my mother-in-law, who lives in Portland, because she’s not around during the year and it’s fun to show her what the family has been up to the past year.  I also give one to my dad because his memory is not good.  He looks through the books quite a bit and it helps him to remember the people he loves.  My family also demands one for our house, because they love to look through them and remember all they’ve done in the past year.  Now, even my children’s friends look through the books to find out if they’ve made an appearance.  When they don’t find themselves, they remind me of when they were up to visit and ask me why I did not include them. Sometimes when they visit during the year they tell me that this would be a good opportunity to take a photo of them to include in my yearly memory book.

So, this year my book was quite extensive.  Last year the book was about 40 pages.  This year it hit the 80 page mark.  I’ve been living, eating, drinking and not sleeping the stupid memory book for the past two weeks.  (Going through my thousands of photos gave me a chance to throw out a lot of bad and useless ones, so that was a good thing.  Frees up my memory.)

I uploaded the book last night on Picaboo just in time to have it ground delivered for Christmas.  It took about 3 hours to upload it, but it is in to the printer!  I have included family, friends and even some of my photo shoots in the book.  I hope it prints up well.

It really is quite easy to make a memory book and the cost for a 20 page book is very reasonable through most sources.  I’ve used picaboo.com, shutterfly.com, blurb.com, mypublisher.com.  There are other ones available…snapfish, mixbook, dotphoto, etc.  I like picaboo because I can download the bookmaking software onto my computer and they have great layouts that make bookmaking quite easy.  They also have great service.  (Last year my three books were delivered on Christmas Eve, much to my delight.  However, two of the books were the ones I made, but the third one was another family’s memories…even though the cover had our family’s picture on it.  Picaboo responded quickly and apologetically for the error, sending me a new book without charge.)

Today it is snowing, so I’m hoping to get some Christmasy type photos for the scrapbook.  Merry Christmas.