This is my absolute favorite project to date! It was easy, inexpensive, and the result was fantastic! My niece is about to experience her first Christmas and turn 1! I wanted to get her something great, so I decided to make her a custom ABC book.
I was inspired by some custom alphabet board books I saw online, but since I left this to the last minute, I didn’t have time to order one. So I came up with a DIY solution and the end product cost less than $8.
- Find your pictures and choose the caption. I wrote down A-Z, and while I browsed through my photos (thank you iCloud and Facebook), I wrote down the caption and saved the picture as the caption name. That way I could keep track of the letters I needed, and they got saved in order. I also tried to use as many family pictures as possible, and it was easy to choose the cutest ones.
- Select a picture for the front cover and back cover.
- Crop to 4” x 6” proportional. If the picture was taken on a phone it might be square or just a little out of proportion. But my local photo lab would only print standard proportion. I ended up doing this after I added captions and it ruined some of my pictures, so do this first.
- Add captions. I choose to use wigflip.com/rolfbot because it’s free, I didn’t need to register, and the text is white with a black outline which can be read over any color. You don’t get a choice of font, but I liked how it looks like a meme. It’s so 2014.
- Print photos.
- Buy a 12-page photo album. This is the key to the simplicity of the entire project. 12 pages plus inside front and inside back cover is exactly 26 slots. I got mine from London Drugs for $1.99.
So easy! And it was super fun to review her first year of pictures.