Family Faces Photo Book
Ellia LOVES books and she LOVES faces...and unfortunately she doesn't get to see her extended family's faces very often because of our constant moves. So we came up with this idea for her birthday last month and she is obsessed with it. She brings it to me about 12 times a day to read...I'm kind of getting sick of my family's faces haha. JK. Okay I'm going to sound like an infomercial here but these books come out so professional looking and are seriously so great for babies. Or adults, if you have a bad memory, I won't judge. They're easy to make and super affordable. Here's how to do it.
Start by going to www.artisanstate.com. That's the magic website where you can get these beautiful books for a ridiculous price.
You want to choose the Black Book option for the best price. I like the photo cover so I can customize it but that's entirely up to you, feel free to go with the boring black book that your baby will hate. I like the lustre surface, the metallic is more for wedding-y photo books. Which of course you can do, but this DIY is for babies, so lustre it up. I looked at Ellia's other baby books and found that 6x6 size is quite popular so that's what I went with. And 20 pages is the max for the $30 total you want (I added pages cause my family's big...it's not that much more.. I think $5?)
Now here's the fun part! Picking out your pictures. Make sure you pick pictures that your family members won't hate cause you'll hear about it if you do...You'll want to have one or 2 extra pictures for the cover. I chose to have one large picture span the front and back but you can also just do 2 separate pictures, one for each. Pick a fun title for the front cover, I did "Ellia's Big Family."
There's several layout options for you to choose from but I stuck with the easiest way and just did one picture per page. You can see the yellow highlighted box I chose. You can add text for the names and place it anywhere on the page. Have fun playing with fonts, I used "comfortaa" which I thought matched the children's book theme. Remember that the pages are full bleed which means the picture prints all the way to the edge so be mindful of that red cut line as you're adjusting your pictures. You don't want to be cutting anyone's heads off! Review everything to make sure it looks good and check out!
BAM! 5 days later this showed up on my doorstep, well packaged and beautiful as could be.
Here's Ellia pointing to her aunt Heather who she's never met because she lives in Uganda with Ellia's uncle Dan and little cousin Wesley. So sweet for her to be able to see her face and make connections!
One of the best things about these books are the PAGES. They're baby eating proof! And that lustre surface I was telling you about means you can wipe off the spaghetti slime. Pretty great.
