Leather Craftsmen Wedding Albums ~ Family Heirloom ~ Chicago Wedding Photographer

I am over-the-moon excited to share my new sample albums with you guys!!! (If you’re interested in seeing what the interior design of my albums looks like – you can see the virtual version HERE – password is “sample”.) This post is designed to show you the outside of these beautiful albums, and the quality of the pages, cover materials, prints, and overall book (which is phenomenal, in case you’re wondering)!

Before I start though – I must admit something to you guys… at the moment I am like a cobbler with no shoes… meaning that James and I have not yet put our wedding photos into an album (yes, 3 years later)! I honestly hate that I haven’t gotten to it yet – but I can PROMISE you that it is first on my personal To-Do list this year!  Because as I’ve learned – the honest truth is – once you get those photos on a DVD or flash drive from your photographer – how often do you pull out that DVD, put it in the computer, and go through those photos? I’m guessing almost never if you’re like us. We took the time to print about 4 photos from our wedding (I know! Sad!) and other than those images – we don’t really see our wedding pictures unless we make the effort to go to our computer and dig them out from the back of the hard drive and view them on our computer screen.

But let me ask you something… what happens if that hard drives crashes? Or if that DVD we have eventually gets lost or becomes obsolete? (And you know it’s going to… every other old medium has… cassette tapes, VHS tapes, floppy discs…) What will we have to show from our wedding day then? What photos will our grandchildren see of our past? Not a whole lot. That’s what. I remember paging through my parent’s wedding photos as a child (and still do on occasion) and I want the same thing for my family.

And trust me – I realize high quality albums are an investment – but I promise you they are absolutely 100% worth it. I got so giddy when these albums showed up at my door!! I spent so much time designing each interior spread, taking time to pick out what cover material I wanted, what color imprinting, and whether or not I wanted photos on the front. The albums were designed with care on this end, and printed and bound by hand on the other end by Leather Craftsmen.

These books feel heavy in your hands. Each page sturdy and thick in between your fingers. The photos are vivid and beautiful in print. There is just something about holding it on your lap – the real images – the real moments – in front of you printed on archival paper and not on a glowing computer screen. I imagine our children and grandchildren paging through ours some day, in awe of how young we once were. These books will last a lifetime and beyond… to pass on from generation to generation. If you’re going to spend thousands of dollars to document your wedding day – then I can’t stress enough how important I think it is to actually put those beautiful photos in an album equally gorgeous and deserving of holding those memories!

Anyway – enough talk about them! Let’s get to the photos!! I ordered two separate albums in hopes of showing more of the cover customizing options available through Leather Craftsmen. These are just a few options of many- trust me!

 

Here are the boxes they come in, each album wrapped in nice soft fabric inside (not pictured)…

The first is covered in taupe Japanese Book Cloth, with all caps modern font imprinted in white on the spine, and three inset 2″ square cover photos.

Preeeetty sure this is the album James and I will be ordering for ourselves in the near future since this matches the color of my bridesmaids’ dresses! 🙂

This album I ordered with the split seam pages so clients could see what they looked like (that’s the black space in the middle of the spread)….

Party pictures make me happy! 🙂

Nice, thick, no-bend pages!

Here you see the split seam pages on the left, and the folded seam pages on the right (in the other album you’ll see below this)…

The second album is covered in gray Euro Leather, with all lower-cased modern font imprinted in copper on the spine and bottom right of the front cover. (You know I couldn’t resist the gray!!)

Again you’ll notice the folded seam in this album through the middle photo…

 

Because I’m so inspired by these new albums and because I want all of my clients to have their images printed and bound  – I’m offering 10% off all albums ordered through the end of June! Contact me for more information and pricing!

(And because I really may have totally lost my mind…) I’m also giving away an 8×8 album (a $700 value) to one lucky wedding client of mine! Just leave a comment below stating which moment I captured for you is your favorite that you’d love to have remembered forever in a beautiful album! A winner will be picked at random out of a hat and announced on the blog tomorrow morning! 🙂 Good luck!!

. . . .

**The contest ends at midnight central time tonight (Thursday, June 21, 2012).
**Any current (already booked for 2012/2013) or past wedding clients of mine are eligible to win.
**The album details: 8×8 album, 15 spreads/30 pages, Euro Leather cover (color of your choice), 1 line of cover imprinting, 1 line of spine imprinting
**The album may be upgraded to include a cover photo, different cover material, more lines of imprinting, additional pages, or upgraded to a 10×10 or 12×12 with the winner paying the difference in cost.

 

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Christy & James are Chicago based but happily travel anywhere in the world that beautiful love stories take them!

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