our 2012 bearski book...

... has arrived!!!  And I'm totally in love with it.  I had a lot of anxiety around this book.  With my 2011, I just used one of the book templates on Shutterfly.  This year I decided to go on my own, and use the blank book for digital scrapbooking that they offer.  From doing project life, I have fallen in love with pocket scrapping and decided to do this book that way.  I started posting pages here on the blog, but I got behind with posting and got on a roll with scrapping, so they're not all on here. 

I had two big stresses when completing this book:

1.  Would I lose things around the edges when printed.
2.  What in the world would I do for a cover.

 Well... for the cover, I used one of Emily Merritt's page templates...

As you can see... I did lose a tiny bit of stuff on the left and right edges, but not enough that it bothers me.  The cover portion of the 12x12 book is not quite 12x12, so keep that in mind when designing your cover.  Other than the tiny bit I lost... I couldn't be more pleased with the cover and how it printed!

I'm also totally thrilled with how the pages inside printed as well.  I used a variety of different templates from The Lilypad and not a single one got cut off when printed.  You can see though, from the samples below... that some templates printed closer to the edge than others, but again, none of them got cut off (and I made no adjustments to the templates)...

The quality of the photo printing is wonderful!  Above you can see some Instagram photos and below the smaller photos were all taken with my iphone.  They all printed really nicely.

Everything below was pretty much taken with my big camera....

... and I'm thrilled with how those came out as well.

This was my test run for my project life photo book I've been working on.  If I had problems with this book, I was considering going the route of printing individual pages and putting them in an album.  But I couldn't be happier with how things turned out!  I'm excited to print my project life book now!  My only beef is the page limit on Shutterfly.  I'm going to have to break my project life book into two parts now, since I'm going to be just over the 110 page limit.  Oh well... on the bright side, that means I'll get to see half my year of pages printed in the next few weeks!!