Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Happy new year!!

Happy new year!

I'm sorry this post is so over due.
I was on a work trip in Paris for about 10 days, a week before Christmas and when I'm back, everything just seem to be in a "daze"... jetlag, Christmas season, clearing annual leave etc.

Also, I started a "journey" on making macarons.
The lack of success is so frustrating that I wasn't spending much time on scrapbooking except for my 365-project (which I just sent out to print at Photobook... no more Shutterfly!).

So one thing at a time...

Winter in Paris...



And unsuccessful macarons...

I can write a long blog post about this but I will save it for the time when I'm finally successful.
I used to say "it's not about the destination but the journey", but after 10 batches of failed macarons, I'm not so sure anymore. LOL!
(But I guess if these 10 batches gets me to 95% success rate in future, it's not so bad afterall!)

Shuttefly has bombed me with lots of discount codes this season and I was tempted to give it a try again.
But it drove me crazy with its "scrapbooker-unfriendly" interface.
First I have to remove the "vivid colour enhancement, which is not so bad because it's just 1 click for all 60 pages.
Then, I have to remove the "auto-crop" one page at a time. C'mon, if I uploaded a square, I would want to print it in square, no?
Then comes the layout, it used to let me set 1 page as full-bleed and then ask if I want the rest of the pages to be changed as well. Not this time. So I had to do it page by page again.
And then the final straw came... the first page cannot be set as a full bleed no matter how I tried. It has to be one of the default layout specific for the first page.
That's it. I closed the page and opened my Photobook application.

It has a new year promotion of 30%, free shipping for S$60 and above and it takes less than 3 weeks to reach me. I do whatever I want on the application, save the book and then make a "proof" which I can then send online for processing. Uploading of the proof was much faster and payment process is the same as most online carts.

It's a full 8-inch page (i.e. the book is slightly bigger than 8") and the colours are a little darker than Shutterfly and not as vibrant. But the ease of making the book wins.
I don't know how other scrapbookers manage to survive the new Shutterfly interface (it wasn't like that 2 years back!) and I'm really interested to find out...

And lastly, here's the latest template for you. Have fun!!

Click on preview to download.