As some of you saw on Facebook, we recently made the most amazing souvenir of our family trip to Paris: a beautiful book.

You can see a preview of the entire book here.

We had found this website Blurb.com that is a self-publishing website (it allows you to make your own books) that a couple of people we know use to automatically make books out of their blog.

I thought this would be simple, since I already have a pretty specific breakdown of our Paris trip here on my blog. All I would have to do is suck this text in, add a bunch of images, and ship it off to the printer. So easy, in fact, that I figured I’d just do it on the sly and give it to Sara for mother’s day.

I downloaded the software from Blurb and put it all together. I took quite a bit more work than I was expecting, but I thought it would be well worth it. However, I was a little too nervous to actually order it without Sara seeing it, so I decided to show it to her before submitting it.

Boy am I glad that I did.

My original version was very text heavy, with only a few small pictures on each page. When all was said and done, we had put countless more hours in, and ended up around version 4 or so. The big difference from version to version was a much bigger focus on the pictures. I think my first version was around 40 pages, and I think we ended around 70 pages or so. I had originally used only the best of the best pictures, but I think we ended up using almost every picture we took. This makes for a much nicer memento obviously. And perhaps we were a little obsessive, going through it over and over, switching pictures, tweaking layouts, etc., but it was sooo worth it.

It turned out perfectly. It is absolutely gorgeous! It is without a doubt the best souvenir one could ever have from a trip like that.

Of course, if you’re going to do it, you might as well do it right, so we sprang for all the extras: premium paper, printed on cover, etc. So it ended up being about $100, minus about $20 from a coupon code we found. So that is pretty pricey, but the book we got in return is absolutely priceless. Each day of our trip is a chapter, full of anecdotes, descriptions and beautiful, full-page pictures.

So, in summary, feel free to use Blurb for all your book making needs (their BookSmart software is pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it, although I should caution that their software has it’s own little…quirks now and again). If you want something to turn out nice, be prepared to put some time in.

And if you come to my house, I’m definitely going to be shoving this book in your face!