About a year ago I blogged about a photo book I’d made with Mixbook.com. It was a collection of photos I’d taken over the years to celebrate and commemorate my grand amour with CHANEL.

Shortly after that, I saw another too-good-to-be-true offer from Picaboo.com. And wouldn’t you know it, I also waited till a week before that voucher expired before embarking on building my Larkie At Large coffee book. Which also happened to coincide with the highly stressful week of the move. So while packing I would take a minute here, an hour there to sort through literally thousands of photos from my travels and shopping excursions to put this book together. Definitely not the extra layer of stress I needed but now that the book is in my hands, I’m quite tickled by it.

So here are a few excerpts from the photobook diaries…

These two photos are the front and back covers of my book. The pics were taken from a bell tower in Bruges and the view of the city below was taken by zooming my camera from between the squares of the window screen that you see me standing behind:

I love using landscape photos as the background–it adds a virtual third dimension to the story you’re telling with the photos in the foreground. I don’t have to tell you what an emotional rush it is from all the memories that come flooding back from each photograph, even the partially covered ones. It’s like a sensory secret you share with your mind and heart!

On this particular page that’s paying tribute to my Birkin (ahh, I still swoon just thinking the two words my Birkin), the background is a high-def shot of the Clemence leather of the bag itself:

A few more pages related to the fashion side of this blog–one is of all the close up shots of buttons and what nots that so endear me to Chanel,

another 2 pages of shots of runway looks as interpreted by yours truly through lucky shopping finds–the background is a pic of one of my all time favorite Chanel items–tweeded jeans,

and another just representing the color red…the background is a closeup shot of the tweed of one of my Chanel coats:

One of my favorite pages though is a compilation of my recent trip to Washington, DC. It has everything I love about that place: the art of history and the history of art. I love the mosaic Chuck Close portrait of President Clinton…

But out of the 70+ pages, I think the most vivid one is of the photos I took in Sapa, Vietnam. They evoke sights, sounds and smells in my head though I know it’s just my sight that gets to relive these moments over and over:

Some day I hope to “publish” a second Larkie At Large book that, on each page, I can build a theme made up of seven photos, one from each continent. That would mean I need to set foot on Antarctica (like soon) and make up for lost time in South America. I think I just challenged myself to something!

Final advice? Spring for the $29.95 upgrade to have the pages lay completely flat. Worth every penny.