My First Post

Digital Publishing is taking the country by storm!! Everyone has a story to tell (or they could/should)!

If you are like me, you probably have thousands of pictures (hubby, kids, dogs, sheep, llamas, pony, relatives -- hey I live on a farm & we have lots of animals!!) that are on the hard-drive of my computer. I have also saved my pics to discs that I have away from my house (just in case of fire you know) and will often send "extra" copies of the files out to relatives. Do I ever take the time to actually open these files? Not hardly ever!! So they just sit there.

I recently found a great company called Heritage Makers. One of my friends was going to a Workshop and invited me along. I am in the midst of writing a couple of Family History Books and went online to check them out. What I saw made be stop and take another look. They had templates for full-color books of various sizes that dealt just with preserving your family history!! and at a fraction of the cost that I could home-publish for if I wanted full-colour pages. Just one of the things that I liked was that I could customize every little element on the page if I wanted to! I had never found this with any of the other publishing options that I had explored. What really floored me though was the HUGE amount of artwork that was available -- over 50,000+ pieces with a Premier membership and over 2,000+ with the Basic membership. I was hooked! The UNLIMITED PHOTO STORAGE that I gained with my Premier account didn't hurt either! That saved me some money from what I was paying for online photo storage.

I actually liked it so much that I signed up to be a Consultant. I wanted to share this great way to showcase photos with others. I found that through the projects that I have made for my own kids that I can make a difference in their lives -- sounds kind of trite but they delight in seeing themselves in actual books that are hardcover, archival quality (acid- and lignin-free) with stitch-reinforced binding. These are professional looking books.

And it's not just books that we are creating:

• Wrapped Canvases - I've done an Ancestor series, Family trees, and one of my brother's two dogs
• Greeting Cards - for Christmas, Valentines's Day, St Patrick's Day, New Baby Greetin Card
• 18x24 Posters - a couple for the kids for Christmas showcasing THEM
• Scrapbook Pages - 12x12, 8x8 and 11x8.5 -- to put in the various albums that I've already gifted people with -- goes a lot quicker than the cut-and-paste ones!! also I have been creating pages to use for making ceramic tiles that I am selling at local Farmers Markets
• Playing cards -- we used them as class Valentines and the kids gave them out as wallet pics and trader cards
• Calendars -- we are currently putting together a puppy calendar for a friend with a pet store

I really can't say enough good things aabout this amazing company and their wonderful products. One of the things that they tell us is the "feeling" that you get when a new parcel arrives. I thought that this was kind of hokey but I am still feeling this "feeling" after 5 months of them arriving!!