Memory Books

My sister-in-law, Nichole, is an amazing digital scrap booker. She is able to take a moment in time and recreate it through pictures, phrases and graphics. She has decided to take pictures from dad's life and make a memory book of just him. The picture is a page that she did two weeks after my dad's death to honor him. The pictures are from his birthday the month previous.

She designs the pages using free templates and graphics from the web and then changes it to fit whatever it is that she wants to create. I believe that she uses Adobe Photoshop to do the designs. I am not nearly as talented as she is but I have come up with my own ideas of memory books to honor those who have passed.

There are several websites that offer different services. The first is iMemoryBook. This is a site that creates a memory book for you based on several people's input. The way it works is that you create this book and have it online for a certain period of days. You then invite people to go to the site and contribute their pictures, stories and messages. I have not personally used it but the interface seems simple enough. The service costs from $49.95 to $199.95 and then the cost of the books (which decreases significantly with quantity). To make the cost worth it, you would need to have a large group of people, too large to collect the memories by yourself. This would be great for large families that are spread out geographically. There is no limit to the number of people you can invite. After everyone has put in what they want, you can edit it to make it look nice and then order books.

The off-line take to this collective memory book idea is something I plan on doing at our next family get together. I bought an album/journal with nice acid-free pages (important if you want to keep it for a long time) and an acid-free pen. I used acid-free glue (ok you get the acid-free point) to glue my favorite picture of my father on the front page. For each page after that I am going to have each member of my family spend time writing their favorite memories about dad. This one is more for me because it's a lot more difficult to mass distribute hand-written things. I suppose I might type them up for everyone in the family and email it to them. I haven't figured it all out yet, but I want to do this because sometimes it is just nice to have things handwritten. I'm a hopeless romantic sometimes.

Another option is using picture book services to create a book. This one can be fairly inexpensive, there are plenty of websites offering this so you can pick and choose, and it's simple to put together. The downside is that there is limited space for words, it is not extremely customizable, and the price can sky-rocket if you try adding a lot of pages. Here are some websites that I know of that do this type of thing. MyPublisher, Shutterfly, and Snapfish are all pretty similar and allow you to upload photos and create albums from there. Price them out depending on what you want to do. iPhoto is a program on Macs that lets you do a lot offline then send it in online. Check out the iPhoto website for more details. Generally, it will cost around $40-50 for the book. I think some of these offer quantity discounts too.

The way that my sister-in-law publishes her digital scrap booking is by creating her designs full-page and then using some of the above services. She uploads her designs as photos and they print out with a full page bleed (right to the edges). It takes a little bit of experimenting and time to figure out what will work best.

Of course there is good old fashioned scrap booking. This takes quite a bit of talent and know-how around serrated scissors. Also, it is difficult to make copies for other members of the family unless you do color photocopies which don't turn out nearly as well as the actual page.

The best way to remember people is by talking about it. These projects may help you remember to great times you had with your parent and share them with people who may not have known them. Good luck!