So there are some occasions when a fruit basket will not do. We have standard gifts for some people in our lives; our former boss gets art books, our sister gets whatever she likes, our loved one usually gets some kind of bicycle parts, our mom gets a sweater, our dad a Philadelphia Eagles book. But what do you do for the other people you’re close to?
Well, we like to create. When we left our last job, we made a retirement themed mix CD (including "Career Opportunities" by The Clash, and "Gimme the Loot" by Notorious BIG), hand created, assembled, decorated and written thank you notes, and cookies. We will ignore that we lifted the paper from our then-boss (she got a long, long thank you on said paper - it wasn’t really a secret). We have a very important friend’s birthday coming up, and we were totally set to make him a small collection of our photography work - as he seems to like it.
Sadly, we had a large amount of darkroom difficulty and time constraints, we didn’t know what to do. He claimed to not want anything photographic/equipment, and his girlfriend- who already seems to dislike us - would probably not be too happy if we gave him a really nice cashmere sweater.
What to do? A mix CD would not be enough. Cookies - pshaw. Thankfully, by way of flickr, we found a site called blurb.
Three (or four) hours later, including two stiff knees, one glob of dog slobber, and two heart stopping minute when the program crashed, we have a completely awesome, 24 page hardbound photo book. We combined photos from our flickr account and his, and we’re so, so stoked to order this book. We think it may be the coolest gift we’ve ever given!
We were going to make a joke about how now we’ve published a book too, but it’s a LOT less cool when you do it yourself with templates on a website. But either way, we’re excited. And hey- we forgot to mention, it’s not that expensive. Our 24 page, hardbound book comes to around $25. If we like it when we get it, we’ll let everyone know - if anyone is interested, we can try to work out a discount with them.
-LB
Source: www.bunnyshop.org
