Summer Vacation Memories

Here's a fun idea for recording those family memories on vacation...

Have a photography contest with the members of your family! My family just got back from a great vacation in San Francisco. Each day of the vacation, we took tons of pictures. At the end of the day, we had to each pick our 5 favorite photos. We then uploaded all 25 photos to Facebook and had people vote on them. It took a few days to catch on, but then we had people coming back each day to see what cool, new things we took pictures of. After we got back, we took the top 5 photos from each day (our friends' choices), and posted them all together as the Championship photos. We then asked everyone to vote on their top 5. As I type this, we are in a 3 way tie! I wonder who the winner of the family photography contest will be?!

If you don't have a Facebook account, you can upload them to Flicker, or Photobucket. And then email all of your friends and family and have them go view and vote on the pictures. This was a fun thing to do as a family. Not only did we have some healthy competition going on, but we now have some really amazing photos for our family vacation book. I'll start working on that soon.

Just a word of caution - don't get so caught up in getting the perfect photo of some"thing", that you forget to take pictures of the people in your family enjoying the vacation.

A few pointers for your vacation book...

1. Using a Vacation Dailies pack of journaling pages from Cherish Bound is the perfect, most easy way to help record your vacation memories. It will take you from the planning, through your vacation, and to the trip home.

2. Make sure to ask everyone to contribute to the book of memories - maybe ask what their top 5 favorite things were. Then, using one page of the book - list all of those. I did this on the last vacation book I made, and I added a picture of each person's TOP FAVORITE THING about the vacation.

3. Get your book done ASAP - don't put it off. Start and finish it the week after your vacation. If you don't, you'll start to forget all of the fun you had.

4. Instead of buying souveniers, save your money, and use it to make a beautiful hardbound vacation book - your kids will love it forever!

Have a great summer vacation - and, let me know if you do the photo contest. I'd love to hear how yours went.

Blog Feature, and Give-Away

Today, this blog is being featured on April Shower's website (she is the designer who did my Incredible Women blog!). I'm doing a SWEET give-away for my feature over there.


Here's what you'll get if you win:

$57 Value Storybook Kit
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"When I Was Little" Story Starter
"Looking Back" Mini Story Starter
"Recipe" Mini Story Starter
All in a Sassy Binder!

Along with this story kit, you'll get a free lifetime customer account, plus a $29 coupon for publishing!!

With this package, you'd be able to do a beautiful book about your childhood, OR even help your parents do a book about theirs! Don't miss a chance to win this fun give-away. Head over to April's blog and do what she says!

And just to get you in the mood for creating your new book, here's a sneak preview - a couple of questions from the "Looking Back" Mini-Story Starter:

"What was your first time away from your home or family?"
"What was the first time you were scared - and what were you scared of?"

CHALLENGE: Try this...

1. Using one of the questions above, for three minutes, brainstorm. Write down everything that comes to mind - names, dates, places, etc. Everything you can think of about the question.

2. For the next 3 minutes, using the stuff you wrote down, flesh out those ideas - make those ideas and words into complete sentences, and then a full paragraph.

Believe me, ANYONE can write for just 3 minutes. Here's mine:

"What was the first time you were scared?"

Brainstorming: me, my friend (probably Alicia), my little sis, Kristin, parents playing cards, movie, Jack Nicholson, bat, ax, hotel, "Red Rum", running up the stairs, Rick teasing me, scariest movie ever!

My Story:

"Well, I don't remember if this was the first time, but it left a huge impression on my memory. I remember quite clearly watching a movie with one of my friends, and my little sister, Kris. My parents used to invite their friends over to play cards. On one of those occasions, the adults were playing upstairs and we were downstairs, watching Jack Nicholson, in "The Shining" - a movie based on a Stephen King novel. We were lying on the floor, cuddled underneath a giant blanket, and every few minutes we would SCREAM our heads off. You know the part in the movie, where Jack is advancing up the stairs toward his wife, who has a bat in her hands? Very calmly, he says, "Give me the bat", as he's stalking her. The screams that came out of our mouths would have made the dead wake up. And the part where he is hacking through the wooden door with an ax, trying to get to his wife, who has locked herself in the bathroom?! Pure terror! I've remembered that all my life. There is nothing that freaks me out more than when my husband teasingly looks at me and says, "Give me the bat, Kara." (!) I'm always thinking about that scene when I'm running up the stairs, too, and I always trip. Looking back, I can't believe that my parents let us watch that movie! They must not have known what is was like."

See? That's not hard AT ALL. It's actually quite fun. Try it! And then, comment on this post, and let me know how it went. (By-the-way, this is what we do in a Story Workshop - we just take questions, one by one, and write about them. It's really fun. If you want to schedule a workshop - either at your home OR as an online party, let me know.)

Genealogy - Make Your Family Tree

Yesterday, my mom came over and we spent some time searching for some ancestors on one of the genealogy sites. I can't believe some of the stories we found about ancestors from the 1600s and the 1700s. Have you ever done this - researched your family? Try it - you'll be amazed at what you'll find. It won't be easy - the answers don't often just fall into your lap - you'll have to be a Sherlock Holmes and solve some mysteries, but it is worth it.

I can't wait to find more stories, and then put them all into a book for my family!

Here's your challenge: Write down your family tree - 4 generations back. And then, using those names, do some research and try to find out something you didn't already know.

Here are some of the great online tools you can use:
www.Ancestry.com
www.Genealogy.com
www.Familytreesearcher.com
www.Familysearch.org
www.Findyourfamilytree.com
www.Onegreatfamily.com
www.Familytrees.net


Let me know how it goes!

Story Starter Question... Discovering Me (Teen)

The new "Discovering Me" Story Starter is for the teens in your life. It's part of the "School Collection" of Story Starters from Cherish Bound. There are 4 sections in this story starter: Discovering Me, Where I Come From, Who I Am, and Where I Am Going. This story starter has 42 "fill-in-the-blank" statements. Here are two of them...

1. I want the world to see me...

2. I just wish I had more...

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A few suggestions on how to use this story starter:
a. Have a "family night", and use these statements to get to know each other better.
b. Give your teen a journal, and use this story starter to give them ideas to write about.
c. Use a statement from the Story Starter to help your teens become better writers.

If you'd like to purchase a Discovering Me Story Starter, or any of Cherish Bound's 50+ Story Starters, you can contact me at (801)360-4666 OR kara(at)cherishbound(dot)com.

Digitizing Memories

The following is a post that appeared on my personal blog today. I thought it would help my customers out, so here you go...

I thought I'd post a few guidelines for scanning pictures here. If you are as old as me (*wink*), A LOT of your photographs are not digital. It's really a good idea to get them scanned and digitized.

Most scanners should allow you to set the dpi guidelines. For normal sized pictures (4x6 and bigger), you should set the dpi to 300. For smaller pictures (3x5s, wallet sizes, etc.) set the dpi to 600. This will take MUCH longer than the pictures being scanned at 300 (which explains why it took me ALL DAY to scan pictures), but it's totally worth it, because you'll be able to enlarge these pictures with no problem.

At the VERY LEAST, please please please fix the red eye in your pictures. Nothing annoys me more then seeing pictures where everyone looks possessed! This should be a simple fix using Photoshop, Picassa, or any photo editor you have.

Before scanning your photos, ORGANIZE them. It's doesn't take that long and it's really worth the time and effort. I usually just take a handful of photos and split them up into different piles. (some suggestions: one pile for each person in your family, trip photos, holiday photos, pet photos, etc.). Get some of those cool photo organizer boxes (they look like shoe boxes), and using the dividers and labels, place your "piles" of photos in the boxes. Then, very methodically, take each pile - scan it - put the pile back - and then move to the next pile.

It's tempting to just scan, scan, scan until you're through with all of the scanning, but I think that it's easier to organize your photos on your computer as you go. I just make a different file on my desktop for each "group/pile" of pictures and as I scan them, I throw them immediately into Photoshop, fix them, and then save them to the appropriate file. SUPER EASY. After scanning, say, all of the photos of my family members into their own separate files, I'll make a new file entitled Our Family Photos (or something like that), and drag all of the individual files into that one master file. Then, I drag that file into my Photo directory.

As I take pictures now with my digital camera, I just upload them to my laptop and put them into the appropriate file.

It really isn't that hard to take that HUGE box full of photos and digitize and organize. Think about how pleased your extended family will be when you present them with a CD full of family photos! I've been working on my family photos (ancestors) for awhile now, and in the very near future, I'll have almost ALL of the existing photos digitized and put onto CDs to distribute to all of my Aunt/Uncles/Cousins/etc. Someone has got to do it - and if it's this easy, maybe that someone should be you! In just a few weeks time, you'll have all of your photos in digital form, and ready to make into a book! Good luck.

If you decide that you just don't have the time to do this yourself, this is something that you can hire me to do. I charge 50 cents per scan - that price includes cropping to the desired size, color fixes, red-eye reduction, and minor photo repair. Plus, I'll put all of your photos onto a CD for free! You can order additional CDs for $5.00 each. You can contact me at kara(at)cherishbound(dot)com.

Other People's Books

I don't know if any of you know this, but if you don't have the time to do your books, I'll do them for you! In fact, I'm actually working on a book right now for a client. His dad is turning 80, and this book is a celebration of his life. I'm having a great time. I'm about 1/2 done, and have about a week until the deadline.

It is entirely possible to do a life story in 2 weeks, or less.

If you'd like to work on yours, or your parents life stories, contact me and I'll help you get going. There is nothing better than giving a gift like this!

kara(at)cherishbound(dot)com. 801-360-4666

My Interview for Startup Princess

I was interviewed over at Startup Princess about my Cherish Bound business. Here's the URL if you are interested in reading the interview...

http://startupprincess.com/introducing-kara-herron-mother-and-blogger/