Once upon a glorious time, back in 2013, I thought I had time to be a “low-key” scrapbooker. I bought myself a Smashbook (which are crazy adorable by the way) and I planned out every page for the first year of our marriage and I made three beautiful pages. And then I stopped and never picked it up again. Did I buy another smashbook in hopes that it would inspire me to scrapbook year two? Of course I did. Did I ever go back to it? No. They’re sitting behind my desk gathering dust as I type. (sorry David for wasting both precious Michael’s coupons and about $30)

I had good intentions. Don’t we always? We want to do the thing and DIY and be crafty, but that requires both self discipline and time. Two things that I don’t have an abundance of outside of my jobs+family+baby+friends+netflix shows+reading addiction. Enter Chatbooks.

I honestly think I discovered these glorious things from an Instagram ad. (so they DO work! ;)) I was scrolling in the early days of feeding Ollie which was basically my whole life for a time and discovered them. My new momma heart and fragile emotions were targeted. Chatbooks are basically the solution of getting your favorite pictures off your phone and into tangibility. AND MY OLLIE INSTAS NEED TO EXIST IN REAL LIFE NOT JUST ON MY PHONE. That was my reaction. And 5 months later, and 4 books in, much more level headed, I still love them enough to share them via the internet. (and no, chatbooks gains nothing from this post and neither do I, I doubt they know I exist) 

Anyways, Chatbooks is a glorious little app that hooks up to whichever social media you choose and prints it in book form. 60 pages per book, $8 for a soft covered little square that holds your most instagram-able memories. Free shipping. You can even link accounts! So for example, I hooked mine up to both David’s and my instagrams and the app automatically loads both of our pictures into a series of books. You can set up a subscription to get 1, 5, or 10 books per month until your series is up to date and then it will just automatically send you a book every time you hit that 60 picture limit. No maintenance required. The only reason I do maintenance on mine is because I take out all of my professional work and I write super long captions that tend to take up extra pages if I’m not careful. (I did this for about 14 books in a furious haze every time I fed Ollie for like a week…) So if you’re a normal/casual instagram user, even better!

(there’s even all types of creative ways to use hashtags and adding from Facebook and etc to customize a book, but I haven’t gotten that far. i’m just stoked about my instagram series right now.)

Friends, that’s all I’ve got, there are SO many ways to print your photos and you definitely should. But that doesn’t mean you’ll remember to! I think/hope/pray you’ve got an urgency to print/frame/order an album for the professional quality photos in your life that you invested money in, but even that can go by the wayside! I feel like iPhone photos are THAT much harder to remember. This is an instant, low cost fix.

Give it a try. I’m honestly loving it. And it’s automatically a good day when one of these ends up in my mailbox! (AND they’re 20% off right now!)

We’re currently doing one book a month to catch up to present day, so we’re getting memories from 2-3 years ago in book form! That makes it super fun to look through….and makes me anxious for ones that include Ollie to arrive :]

I’m not really even sure if I benefit at all from giving you this code, but hey! Free chatbook! Take it and try it out :]