If you have read my two most recent WDW TR's, you know one thing we LOVE to do with DS is character greetings! He absolutely loved meeting characters on his first trip, and loved them even more on his second. He would run up for hugs, even from the characters that he didn't know who they were (Rafiki, Baloo, Pinocchio to name a few). Nowadays, my kiddo is a walking Disney character encyclopedia, it seems.
He definitely recognizes a lot more of them, and what movie they are from, etc. We did an autograph book last year, and he didn't seem to understand the concept of the autographs, but I'm hoping it will make more sense this year. So I thought I'd share his 2013 book with you to keep this PTR moving along!
Last year, I made his book through
Arts Cow and they gave me a LOT of trouble for the characters on the front cover, wanting to make sure we had permission to use them, etc. So this year, I looked for one that he would like just as much but didn't have characters on it. I checked
RustManFan's thread and pored through her Photobucket until I found the perfect image for his cover! This year, I used
Shutterfly and maybe they wouldn't have given me any grief over using a character on the front cover, but I didn't want to deal with the hassle if they did.
DS still loves trains, so this cover was a big hit! He likes to take the book out every now and then and flip through the pages, which works well for me because I am priming him for all of the characters we are planning to meet. It's quite a few more than I had planned on last year, but I think we can get every box filled!
I found all of the images on the DIS in the thread
A Simple Guide to Making an Autograph Book on the Creative DISigns board. Last year, I used more of the pages that were an entire 8x8 page for each character. But I wanted to fit a lot more characters into this book, and there are not too many 8x8 designs to choose from. So since I didn't want to repeat any pages, I went with the ones designed to prints as 4x6 and just combined 2 to a page.
That left me with two big hunks of white on the sides of each picture that I was unsure how to fill. Shutterfly's printed and solid color backgrounds just weren't cutting it. Luckily, my DH does come up with wonderful ideas sometimes and suggested finding themed backgrounds to go with each page. I turned to trusty old Google for that, and he helped me come up with what to search for. I found a cute dog paw print & bones background for Goofy & Pluto, Andy's wallpaper for the Toy Story characters, an anchor background for Donald & Daisy, a Hawaiian background for Lilo & Stitch, etc. It was fun and a bit challenging to find good ones, and some turned out better than others. I love most of them, but Phineas & Ferb was a challenge. I tried to find a good picture of blueprints to use as a background, but it didn't turn out so well. Overall, though, I think the book came out great!
For those of you who collect character autographs, what kinds of books do you use? I'm always looking for new ideas!
That sounds safe. 
And that announcement about what constitutes an emergency on the train is one of the most bizarre things I've heard. 
It's a good thing I'm not pregnant anymore, otherwise I might'v emade DH drive up there and get me one of those slices. 
That really is insane, though. The plate those pieces were on looked so weighted down. 
So at last, all of DH's price stalking has paid off, and we snagged flights for $99/person each way. When it has been $130/person each way since the the flights were released, I have to say, I don't think it's going to get much cheaper than $99!
One more thing off of the to-do list!
