Create your photo story books online

One of the more popular hobbies among women is creating scrapbooks to show of the photos of their children, families, vacations and more. However, the cost and time that is involved in scrapbooks has started to turn many traditional scrapbookers to digital scrapbookers.

'Heritage Makers' – helps you to create photo storybooks. Now you don't need to store your photos on your computer, but rather you can make stories with your pictures while creating a 'scrapbook.'

Using an online studio tool, scrapbook enthusiasts have access to over 40,000 pieces of artwork, paper stock, embellishments and templates – meaning they don’t have to give up the creativity that they’re used to with traditional books.

It’s all online! No special “scrapbook rooms” needed, no scrapbook storage to buy. Plus, it’s easy to use the online art, because the “drag and drop” functionality means that they can also create pages in a snap, often in much less time than a regular scrapbook.

In addition to “decorating” the pages, there are text boxes to add to the pages, allowing for the telling of the stories BEHIND the photos as well.

Once the pages of the photo storybook have been created online, scrapbookers can then send it to print – resulting in a high-quality, hard-bound, bookshelf-appropriate album. There’s even the ability to put text on the spine of your “album” so you can quickly see which photos are in which books!

There are so many great uses for photo storybooks aside from using them as traditional scrapbooks as well. Brides-to-be can create wedding albums, sign-in books with pictures of the couple, bridal shower books, wedding party gift books, photo thank you cards, etc. Families can honor their traditions by creating cookbooks of Grandma’s recipes, Mother’s Day or Father’s Day books, special books for recent grads to remember their high school or college years, memory books of family members that have passed on, and more. And world travelers – like me – can document their trip in photos and text stories that bring the vacations to life!

For an example of one of my vacation photo storybooks, here is a link to the one I created for my Boston trip, so you can see one in action online!

Link: 'Heritage maker'

Creating a photo storybook is something like booking a vacation online. You can do it on your own, but if you need more professional help you can contact a publishing consultant to help!

Guest author: Carmen Shirkey

'Life Hackery' - A nice blog with useful tips and hacks

'Life Hackery' is a nice blog which I discovered while browsing 'stumble upon'. The blog offers useful tips and hacks to make your life better. There are many variety of topics you can read and browse about the tips and hacks.

From the top link bar you can directly go for the posts which are related to these topics:
# Art & Design
# Automotive
# Entertainment
# Gadgetry
# Health
# Home
# Internet
# Life
# Money
# Productivity
# Technology

I just checked the 'art/design' to check what kind of stuff they offer and I was happy to see many good and quality posts like as 'How to Plan a Surprise Party?', '17 Uncommon Uses for Cotton Swabs', 'Five Funky Ways to Reuse Gift Wrappers' etc etc. I was really inspired with the post '17 common uses for cotton swabs' because I am one of those crafts lovers who prefer to use cheap or recycled material.

More about the site (in their own words)

'Who doesn’t want life to be easier? In our time-obsessed society, we’re always looking for shortcuts, and we share the ones that we find with you. Keep reading, and you’ll find useful, unusual and (sometimes) ironic tips and tricks to hack your life into shape.'

You can discover a lot more at the site.

Site link: 'Life Hackery'

Save money with 'The grocery game' -

Frugal means 'economical', 'wise in the expenditure' and when we start talking about frugal hobbies, it means 'hobbies which can be adopted without or spending very minimal cost. Collection of coupons, discount vouchers and promotional codes is one of those frugal hobbies which most of the housewives love to do. Saving money is another fun activity or entertaining as it gives us satisfaction and pleasure. It is pleasure if you could save up to 50% on your grocery bills monthly.

You can save a lot of money with the Grocery Coupons which are offered by 'The Grocery Game' where you can save money with your groceries and you know it better that grocery saving means a good amount of money month after month.

The story behind the creation of this site is interesting. It all started when Teri Gault (the company's founder and CEO)was trying to save money. He started it by collecting coupons and matching them to grocery store sales. Gradually this hobby became a passion.

Now Teri is sharing her money saving ideas with us through this site. The Grocery Game offers "TERI'S LIST" in all 50 states.

How to play the grocery game?

You'll get a weekly list of the lowest-priced products at your supermarket matched with manufacturers' coupons and weekly specials -- advertised and unadvertised. You have to pay a little fee to play this game, but if you could save hundreds of dollars by paying a little amount then it is definite saving.

Adopt Frugal hobbies to save money

There is a long list of hobbies, leisure activities which people love to adopt but many hobbies are expensive as you need to spend some money for those activities. But if you want to save money but need to be involved in some kind of hobbies without spending any money (or at least with minimum amount of money)then 'frugal hobbies' can help in this regard.

What are the frugal hobbies?

A few frugal hobbies might be:

Gardening
Reading
Sewing
Crafting
Baking/Cooking
Photography (now everyone has digital camera or at least a cell phone with digital camera, so it is an inexpensive hobby)

To my point of view these all activities come into category of recreational or creative hobbies and at the same time these hobbies help you save money. The list can be long enough because it depends upon you which kind of recreational activities or hobbies you can find around you.

Useful links and posts:

* Frugal hobbies at 'frugal families'

* Frugal Hobbies You Can Enjoy on a Budget

* Creatively Frugal Hobbies

Enjoy stunning stock photography at 'Hicker Photo'

Photography has become a child's play due to easy use of cell phone and digital cameras. Taking stunning and high resolution pictures is easier than before. There are a lot of sites around the net where you can enjoy browsing the stunning adventure travel pictures. I love to browse the travel and adventure travel picture sites as it is a way of having fun sitting at home.

'Hicker Photo' offers stock photography which is really stunning and you can have fun browsing through the stunning pictures. Let's learn about the term 'stock photography'

'Stock photography' consists of existing photographs that can be licensed for specific uses. Publishers, advertising agencies, graphic artists, and others use stock photography to fulfill the needs of their creative assignments.

A customer who uses stock photography instead of hiring a photographer can save time and money, but can also sacrifice creative control. Stock images can be presented in search able online databases, purchased online, and delivered via download or email.

'Hicker Photo' is one of the most popular travel stock photography and travel websites with over 3 million visitors per month. The site is owned by Rolf Hicker who is well known both internationally for his work as a nature, travel, and wildlife photographer and filmmaker.

Travel Information & animal, nature and travel stock photography by award winning photographer Rolf Hicker
Travel goes hand in hand with stock photography - both are our life and passion.

You can find free travel information and travel stock photography - collected over many years of traveling, and ideas for "not so known" destinations.

There is a collection of digital stock library of over 15,000 pictures. They offer rights managed animal (mostly wildlife), nature and travel stock photography as well as licenses for stock photos. These images are available in mediums such as high resolution files, quality fine art prints, and mouse pads with nature photos.

Useful links:
- 'Foto search' - a provider of royalty free and rights managed stock photography, illustrations, maps, video, and audio.

- 'Acclaim images' provides free photo research alongwith high quality, limited distribution digital images and art. prints.

Find craft and hobby ideas at 'Hobbies and Crafts'

There are many blogs which are personally created just to share ideas for crafts or handcrafts. These blogs are a good source of taking tips or ideas to make wonderful projects for your home or simple things to give as a gift.

Hobbies and crafts offers ideas, tips to create crafts for your home. It also provides reviews of handcrafted and decorative objects.

There are many posts about decorative crafts and there are many tips which we can use to make projects for ourselves. But there is only one thing which blog reader would notice that there is no picture of the crafts. If pictures of those crafts were added then the blog posts would be more valuable and attractive to the blog audience.