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Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Digital Photobooks

One of the many things I love doing is designing digital photobooks.

I like to use BLURB to print the books as they have a great range of sizes and options for the finished product. Depending on the budget, you can go from basic to top of the line including linen covers and sheer inserts.

The challenge when doing one of these books is keeping a uniform design concept throughout. If I'm doing a book from ONE EVENT (eg. a wedding, holiday, school highlights) then this is much easier to achieve. Here is an example of a recent book I did for a barmitzvah album. Doing a one-event book, can also be executed quite successfully by simply using the templates available in Blurb - although I like to create myown templates so that the pages don't all look the same!

However, I recently did a book for an 80 year old as a tribute to his life. I've decided to call this type of book a LifeAlbum. With these albums, it's much harder to create the uniformity of design, as I am given vintage photos, black and whites, documents, certificates, postcards, and all sorts of paraphernalia aside from photos, to include in the book. 80 years of photos and memorabilia is no easy task to incorporate into a book, but once it's done, it's such an amazing keepsake.

I like to design using Photoshop and PSElements as well as sometimes using the templates available in Blurb.

At the moment, I'm also designing a book for myself called my great big collection of family photos


This is an idea that came to me when I realised that although I have printed photos or albums of big events or holidays we've had over the last 7-10 years, there's not much photographic evidence of any life in between those events - other than a lot of images saved onto CD's! All the birthday parties, lost teeth, ballet concerts, school ceremonies, mother's day breakfasts etc. are nowhere to be found... until now! In my Big Book! I'm sure, once it's done, my family will be very chuffed to see themselves in pictures again - on the coffee table.

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Floral Workshops

I have taken the proverbial plunge and designed a series of Floral Workshops for home floral styling!

Yes... after much deliberation and consideration, I decided to do it. I've done workshops with children for so long, and so the time has come now to give working with adults a try!

From my experience working at the Florist, I discovered that so many people actually don't know very much about flowers - they either stick to buying the same things, spend money on the wrong things, or often waste money buying things they don't know how to look after. Not knowing how to look after fresh cut flowers or plants can be quite costly, so I've designed my workshops around all the questions people often ask at the florist, and added in some extra bonus activities - like how to make a vase of metal or glass, which I thought would be fun (and very appropriate seeing that I am facilitating the workshops and I love making things!).

Maybe one day, I might write an e-book with all the info I put into my workshops.

If you are interested to book in or read more details, please click here or in the link on the side bar of my blog.


The workshops will be loads of fun and make lovely gifts for anyone who loves flowers! Contact me if you would like a gift voucher.