Hey Everyone!
Here it is: our gift to Il Volo this summer!
(note: the pink text on each photo does not appear in the actual book)
I have to say, Il Volo has the best fans in the world! I know they know that; we know that. But, I’m just amazed each time we ask, you guys deliver. 🙂 So many beautiful sentiments/pictures were sent, and so many monetary donations. Thank you for your generosity!
I can’t take a picture of every page, but if you sent me something, I put it into the book — even the things people sent to my home. Every comment and picture was included. Finished, the book is 31 pages long, an additional 11 pages to the 20 it came with.
We also included some posts from the site. I have to thank Marie for doing the lion’s share of work on that piece of the project. She went through all of our posts (do you know that we have over 700?!) and then emailed me her top 50. I have no idea how she narrowed it down even that much. 😀 You all have been so prolific and engaging here that there were so many that we wanted to include.
In the end, I narrowed it down to 10 and then further when I received the converted .pdf files (thanks to WordPress for helping me figure out how to do that). Some of the posts were much too long when converted into documents (some were 20 pages by themselves), and on others, the integrity of the formatting/text was actually compromised, so they couldn’t be used. The posts that were included are:
- Il Volo is a Phenomenon ~~ by Jeannette
- Music Notes; Myron’s Take on Eurovision ~~ by Myron
- Indescribable ~~ Flight Crew game to use every letter of the alphabet to describe Il Volo
- Grande Amore; The Wait is Over ~~ by Jana
- Coming Home ~~ by Marie
- One Soul With Love for the Holidays
I will ship the books to our wonderful news contributor, LiJoy this week. She graciously agreed to carry our gift with her to Italy. I have not included pictures of gift wrapping since…well I haven’t bought it yet. 🙂 But, LiJoy has asked that they be gift bags; they will be easy to pack, easy to use when it’s time to give them to The Guys and will still allow her to get through security and customs during her journey since the books won’t already be wrapped.
Now down to brass tacks. I promised that I would be up front with you about how your donations were being spent, so here we go:
- Over $200 was given for this project. Our order for 3 books (one for each of them) with shipping came to just over $100 during Shutterfly’s 4th of July sale.
- The package will be sent UPS to allow me to receive a tracking number, have insurance provided and insure that it is taken care of better than when it goes through the post office. The gift bags will also be purchased out of this money.
- The remainder of the money has been saved. We can use that for another project or for something else. We will “talk” with you before using any of it to get your input.
I hope this meets with your approval. Thank you again for participating and your generous help in providing this gift for Our Guys. I hope they love it! And thank you, LiJoy, for taking it to them!
~~Kelly