I have mentioned on here before how we do an annual photobook – kind of like our version of a family yearbook. Well I love them so much that I thought it would be nice to do something similar for my pregnancy. After all, we had been taking weekly “bump” shots and I had been keeping a little diary too, so I thought it would be nice to capture everything in one spot. When I was browsing online, I saw some gorgeous books that people had spent tons of time designing and even some templates that were for sale, but before I pulled the trigger I thought I would look on the major photobook sites to see if they had any free pregnancy templates. Low and behold… Shutterfly had one that I totally dug.
It’s called their ‘Pregnancy Journal’ template (you can find under the ‘baby’ tab), and it comes with all kinds of cute page options — one for announcing the news, each trimester, ultrasound pics, etc. A lot of them look like chalkboard designs or other hand-drawn doodles.
Anyway, I was totally smitten. I worked on it over the course of several weeks and just sort of plugged away at it here and there. Basically all you have to do is upload the photos you want to use to Shutterfly, and then insert them into the template pages. In addition to those, I also created and customized some pages myself. It was really pretty easy, and by using the template it definitely went waaaay faster than the yearly books I have done from scratch.
Well, it arrived on our doorstep and is a beauty. Really, the quality of these books is just lovely.
Make a pregnancy photo book using shutterfly
I used about a third of the template pages available, like this “It’s a girl!” page. There is also lots of room to add text, which is nice.
I put in scans of both of our ultrasound pictures, and then for the weekly bump shots I would do a page like the one on the right. This was a page I designed myself, but I kept the background in the same colour as most of the other “chalkboard” style pages. I put in the bump photo and some notes from my diary from that week. Mostly just things around how I was feeling or pregnancy/baby-related things that happened that week.
A couple pages dedicated to creating the nursery…
and the baby shower…
And each trimester has one of these template pages, so you can easily organize the book into your three trimesters.
I thought this “Choosing your name” page was cute. I always love hearing about what other names people considered, don’t you? We had a pretty lengthy list of girls names that we thought were pretty, but fairly quickly zoned in our top 5: Maya, Isla, Nora, Emmerson, and Sophie/Sophia. For the last couple of months we were pretty sure it was going to be Maya, but kept the others as contenders until we saw her. I still love all of the names, but our girl is definitely a Maya. Funnily enough, I now know 5 little Isla’s (!!).
Our neighbours made us the sweetest card when Maya was born with all kinds of things related to the day and year she was born – Astrological sign, celebrities born on the same day, etc. I used the same idea on this page and included things about her sign, element, and year (from the chinese calendar).
We put our first ever family photo on the back cover.
And personalized the spine too.
This is definitely going to be a treasured keepsake. I ended up adding a whole whack of pages to the original book so the price adds up, but I got it printed during one of Shutterfly’s rotating sales and got 35% off. Keep your eyes peeled for those, because they definitely come up often enough. I can’t say enough good things about the quality and ease of putting the book together on Shutterfly – highly recommended (and FYI – this is NOT a sponsored post)!
Do you guys make photo books? Or do you do books by hand? I find putting these books together on the computer is so much faster for me than making scrapbooks, and they take up so much less space on the shelf. I know this particular one will be treasured for years to come!