Vistaprint Christmas Cards: Review

I'm a dork, I love sending out Christmas cards and I run to the mailbox every evening to see if one of our friends has sent us a card.  I love them.  I love displaying them in the house so I have smiling family and friends around me for a few weeks.

Our Christmas Card display from 2011

While I was decorating the house this year I went back to the 2011 cards that we received, yes, I kept them, and it was a fun trip down memory lane.  So many couples now have babies who didn't last year and the kids that were in the photos last year have grown so much in just one year.  That's why I love Christmas Cards.

This year I ordered our cards off of Vistaprint.com after seeing a deal on Groupon.  I spent one evening on Thanksgiving weekend playing around with the 900+ card options they have on the site and finally decided on one of them, using one of our favorite wedding pictures as our main image.  It took a while for me to decide on our card, there are so many great ones to choose from.  I know there are a ton of sites out there, even Etsy, where you can create your own card and I think the best advice I can give when picking your cards, pick a site and stick to it.  If you jump around to multiple sites to compare cards, you'll drive yourself nuts.  With the deal we had, it was a no-brainer, we were using Vistaprint.  When comparing prices, they were on the lower end of the scale, too.  Once we found 3 or 4 cards we really liked I picked 4 or 5 photo options and played around with them to see which combination I liked the most.

The ordering process was very simple and the cards were delivered faster than they had quoted.  Love that! I was a little nervous that the cards wouldn't be top quality but they are great - exactly what I was looking for.  The image is clear, the type is clear on the front and the back and the paper weight feels like it's a nice quality paper.  I couldn't be happier.

If you haven't ordered your Christmas cards yet, or are planning on sending them out next year, I highly recommend Vistaprint.

Shutterfly Photo Book

One of the best parts of our wedding reception was the photo booth.  We purchased a deal on Living Social and it turned out to be one of the most memorable parts of the night - especially for our guests.

We paid for a DVD with digital copies of all of the photo booth images from the evening.  We got hard copies of a few of the images, but the DVD was perfect so we can go back to the pictures over and over again.  The night after the wedding we had my family over after dinner to scroll through the pictures and had a big laugh.  Some of our friends are crazy... and our family, too.

I didn't know what we were going to do with all of the photo booth pictures and one of my friends suggested we put them into a photo book.  On many of the photo printing sites available like Shutterfly or Snapfish there is an option to create your own photo book.

Book cover

To create my photo book of the photo booth pictures I used Shutterfly and found the process was super easy. While book making you get to choose your book size, photo layout and all the text in each book you create.

Inside front cover

We chose to make an 8x10 hardcover book.  Because we had so many pictures to choose from we decided to remove any text in the page layouts and focus on just the pictures of our friends.  I think they speak for themselves.  We ended up with 24 pages of photos.

Props are fun

Photo booths are fun, right?  Almost everyone who came to the reception participated in the photo booth.  For those who didn't take any pictures, I've called them out on being party poopers.

I was able to get nearly all of the pictures into the book.  There were some groups of people who took more than 5 sets of pictures, I chose the best pictures from those groups.

Check out the last page of our book, the right page in the picture above.  That is the photo booth strip, exactly as it is.  He stood perfectly still for all 4 photos.  AMAZING.  It was the last set of pictures on our disc and we about died when we saw it.  Heads up to anyone with the next photo booth we come across - we're doing this.