The book has finally arrived!

It’s always exciting to get your hands on a new book, but when it’s one you’ve put energy into creating yourself it’s that much more thrilling. Hope and I have been waiting patiently for the last week and so we were quite excited to finally get our hands on the book I created capturing memories from her first year in kindergarten. I thought I’d share a sneak peak of some of the book that I had so much fun creating.

The book is 140 pages and for the third time I used blurb.com to publish the book. I love the quality of blurb books – because it really looks just like a book you’d purchase in a bookstore. The cover was created using one of Hope’s illustrations she made this year with her and her friends from school. Her handwriting was also used in the title of the book “Our First Year at Riverdale Elementary”. I was quite excited to hear that Blurb now prints directly on hard cover books – which is what I ordered.

In designing this book, I approached the first half of the book as a scrapbook. I collected images taken by Hope’s teacher, photos I had taken myself, and drawings created by the students to incorporate into the book. So though some may consider this to be like a “yearbook” – it’s far from the typical year book. My goal was to make a memorable keepsake that Hope, her classmates and Hope’s teacher would cherish for years to come.

Here’s the first spread in the book which is the “dedication” page which includes not only my dedication and a few photos but Hope also created a special drawing for her teacher:

One of my favorite pages in the book is the second spread which has more photos as well as the letter written by Hope’s teacher to the students.

I feel quite fortunate to have had the opportunity this year to have visited Hope’s class on a few occasions to capture some of these memorable moments. Two of my absolute favorite classes were music and art – I definitely think some of the images help capture the fun I observed.

One of the things that I felt was most important when designing this book was that I focused on giving all of Hope’s classmates equal focus within the book. I devoted two pages to each of her classmates. One page held a large image along side the student’s name which they wrote themselves. On the other page there were several images of the student as well as drawings the students made of the school and the student with their teacher.

The last half of the book I featured hundreds of photos taken by both Hope’s teacher and myself. I realized how unrealistic it was to create a “scrapbook” with the nearly 1000+ images I had so this was the next best way to still ensure we had a way to keep those special moments tucked into this book. Some of my absolute favorite images I devoted an entire page to each image.

If you’re interested in seeing the first 15 pages of the book you can preview it online or of course you can always purchase your own copy through blurb.com. If you’re interested in seeing a few more images of the book – you can check out the ones I’ve posted in my flickr account. Hope you all enjoy!