Back in the day, I was a prodigious scrapbook keeper, which for me felt like an extension of keeping two successive five-year diaries. I made a scrapbook for each of our travels right up until my daughter Ella was born in 2000 including our road trip down the West Coast in 1999, at which point we switched to digital photography. And yes, even back in the 1990s my husband and I were obsessed with food! It’s wonderful to look through the menus, photos and exhibitions we visited on our travels. I even did a few picture series; my favourite is one where all the members of our family sat on our then new sofa in groups, but that’s another story!

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Our 1999 trip down the West Coast (in the background); our food scrapbook (in the foreground)

For many years we posted photos on Ella’s web page, which we updated weekly. Then Facebook came along, and I started to keep all my photos in albums. And slideshows in iPhoto and iMovie, we mustn’t forget those! But still there was nothing physical to look at, no solid evidence of our adventures together.

Then in the summer of 2011, I heard about two new exciting projects. One was Instagram and the other was Blurb books. At the end of my first summer of Instagram, I decided to put these two things together and make a Blurb book of our pictures. Things were pretty basic back then in the world of iPhoneography, but it’s still lovely to see what we got up to and while I didn’t make use of Blurb’s fancy editing tools, I know that I will next time!

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Our summer 2013 Artifact Uprising book (in the background); our Blurb instagram book (in the foregound).

For summer 2012, I decided to go one step further and make an album just of our our adventures on film in an Artifact Uprising book. Shipped over to me by FedEx, this was an altogether different book of memories. The layout was easy to edit and the overall book was stunning. It remains on the coffee table and we often find ourselves flicking through the pages especially in the depths of winter.

So what’s up next? Well, I have already begun to plan an Instagram book using Artifact Uprising for summer 2013. I’ve started collecting the images on my vsco grid and can’t wait to flick through the real pages once I’ve finished it. And being more than half way through the year, I’m looking for a way to print out my Diptych 365 at the end of the year too. Does anyone have any suggestions for who I should get to print it? I’d love to hear who you would recommend.

Kirstin