Two Peas in a Pod - new kit!

This kit has 4 background papers, a scalloped green overlay, a curlicue heart embellishment, a hand-drawn peapod frame for two photos, 1 title, and 4 peapod drawings (parts of the peapod you see here).

Freebie roller-skating background

Here's a background I made with the roller-skate drawing. The texture came from www.grungetextures.com.

Copyright Lisa Twede, 2009: Free for personal use. Contact me for commercial use.

Freebie Background - Skeleton Leaves

My current picaboo book

This is a link to be able to view the book I'm currently working on. It is just a chronological scrapbook of my life in 2009. I still have some gaps to fill in, like my son's running. I will probably just keep adding pages until the end of the year, and then print myself a copy.

http://preview.picaboo.com/Webview/CoverPage.aspx?user=000000000004B7DF77&album=000000000004DB9119

SumoPaint

SumoPaint (www.sumopaint.com) is a neat free digital art editor. It is more for creating images from scratch than for photo editing. But it is very user friendly and has some neat tools.

I think it could be put to good use making embellishments, backgrounds and other digital scrapbooking elements.

Here is something that took me less than a minute to create.

No software to download. You just go to their site and use the tool.

I don't know how they make money. I don't even see any advertising on their site.

Create and enjoy!

Quick Review of Some Photobook Sites

These are sites with tools to let you create a photobook or scrapbook digitally. They print and ship the books. The REALLY nice thing about doing it this way is you can make multiple copies. So for instance, you want to make a yearbook for your child's sports team. You can make a yearbook, buy a copy for yourself and another for the coach, and any other parents on the team can buy a copy if they want directly from the website. You don't have to collect their money or distribute the books. Some of these sites will even pay you a royalty.

They all have various strengths and weaknesses. Some sites are self-publishing sites for writers; others are photosharing sites. But all offer some way to get photos, text and at least some background art into a book form.

First, a straight list of the websites. This isn't yet a complete list. I ran out of time checking these out! So this post will have some follow-up posts.

Of these, I've used lulu.com extensively. I've used walgreens.com once (super easy). And I'm really excited about www.picaboo.com. I like the hand-made scrapbooky look-and-feel, and huge arsenal of creative tools they have. I plan to use them for my next book. I'll write about the experience.

OK here's the list. More info to come!

www.shutterfly.com
www.blurb.com
www.walgreens.com
www.mypublisher.com
www.picaboo.com
www.smilebooks.com
www.photobookexpress.com