Bags of Love in a Photo Album

The other day Fran had to do a photo project; she’d been set it by a member of the cleft support team who wanted her to celebrate her face, her beauty and her smile. She’s their pin up girl, the child with her photo in all the cleft clinics in our area and they were surprised to find out she’d been worrying about her smile. She did the project happily and ended up rummaging about in a box full of scrap-booking stuff I had hoarded and while doing so, she found a spare copy of a scrap book that I’d made as gift ideas for family members a few years ago. It made her want to do one and she asked for some links to digital photos of herself as a baby so she could download them.

Of course, we don’t have any. All our baby photos of Fran were taken with good old fashioned film, printed by a shop and stuck into photo albums. I’m not even sure I have the negatives any more. Our first digital camera arrived with Amelie and since then, digital is what we do. They are archived variously in odd and inconvenient places, olde-worldy cd-roms and laptops and data sticks and online places and the like, but not in kind of photo album that you can flick through, crowd round and have on a shelf ready to pull out at a moments notice. Even the ones we have are tucked away now, whereas they used to have pride of place on a shelf.

I keep meaning to do something about this; my haphazard archiving worries me at the best of times but making photo albums is low on my priority list time wise and even when I get the urge to do something about it, I can never find albums I really like enough. So when Bags of Love offered me one of their personalised books, I thought it was too good an opportunity to turn down. I chose a photo to be printed on to the front and back of the album and waited for it to arrive.

It is fair to say I probably wouldn’t have ordered something like this as a rule, I tend to shy away from personalised items and I don’t really know why; I’ve certainly been missing out with this. The album is durably covered in fabric, the print of the photo (and I didn’t have a very high resolution version) is crisp and attractive and the quality inside is excellent – really nice thick interleaved pages which will be a please to fill. I can definitely see us ordering more of these to make up a family archive and I think the personalised jewellery boxes would make lovely sweet sixteen birthday presents too. In this house, I’m hoping to celebrate at least 4 of those.

Disclosure: I was sent this album free of charge in exchange for this review. The opinion of the album is entirely my own.