Imagewrap covers: let's you put a full bleed image on the front and back covers with no dust cover to get lost or torn. See mine above. I decided not to put any words on the cover, but you can.

Work on your desktop: When you make your Blurb book, you will download their free software and work right on your own computer rather than online. This is much better because it's faster and you don't have to upload all your photos, in fact, it can open your iPhoto or Flickr folders right in the program.

Flexible layouts: I'm very picky about design and had a lot of ideas about how I wanted my pages laid out. To be honest, it took me a while of playing around with the layouts provided in their program to figure out how to get what I wanted. The trick was when I realized you can use part of a layout and the other boxes just won't appear. That's when I realized how flexible their layouts really were and I was pretty happy with their options.

Cool themes: I'm not a big theme person. When I started my book, I was pretty sure I would stick to a modern look with simple white lines, but once I started playing around with their themes, I realized there were some nice little accents that could be added and I have to give them credit for having some cooler themes than the kitschy stuff you expect. The dandelion illustration I used on this page breaks up the age after page of photos and the nice little border you can see on the very first image in this post ties the photo to the page more.

Even small images looked good: I didn't have a single image that the Blurb layout program, which warns you when an image is too small, thought was big enough for a full bleed, but I found that even images that were too small came out looking pretty good and the thumbnail layout is great for using lots of little images that you take from your cellphone or something.

Things that could be improved:

I wish there were more layouts for 6 and more images on a page with varying image sizes. They have some collage layouts where the images overlap which I don't like. I want something similar to their other nice clean layouts but with multiple image sizes. Like the above layout which I actually imported as a PDF from a book I had already laid out in Apple's book program.

Overall my images came out looking great, except for the ones that are a little dark. That tends to be pretty common that images come out dark. Your computer screen is backlit so images seem brighter. I wish there was some way to know if an image was going to look dark when printed (my printer didn't make them look dark).

Another thing to watch out for is that you will lose a bit of picture into the crack of the book, so be aware of that when you are laying out full bleed images.

For more blurb tips and ideas check out our previous post.

Enter our giveaway:

Five winners will win a blurb.com credit for $29.95 which is enough to get yourself a book like the one I had made. To enter just leave a comment on this post telling us your favorite holiday activity. Five winners will be selected at random, so email this link to all your friends.

Comments must be left by 5pm on Friday, November 14th. Winners will be announced the next day. Please leave a first name and initial in your comment so we can post the winner by name.

If you can't wait to start your book, use the blurb discount code mommypoppins10 at checkout to get 10% off your blurb book. The code expires November 25th.

For all you giveaway lovers, we have lots more giveaways coming up this month so keep checking back.