We're sharing on how to turn a photo book into a DIY Baby Book. For those that are not the scrapbooking type, this photo books are perfect.
Making a DIY baby book this way has made the whole things way easier.
If you are anything like me, you take about a billion and a half pictures of your baby either on your phone or digital camera. While I love the idea of making a baby book full of super cute scrapbook paper, the truth is that there is no way I have enough time (or patients) to do that.
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DIY Baby Book.
After baby #1 was born, in 2008, I was so good at organizing the picture each week and making sure to highlight my favorites, and move them into separate folders and after her first birthday I sat down and created the most amazing hard cover DIY baby book. It documented her first moments, her first trips, each holiday and oh my goodness you guys, it was so pretty.
I made that amazing book on Blurb. For those that do not know Blurb, its a publishing platform for book-makers, photographers, and authors to publish their books. While I'm certainly not publishing this book to anyone else, except maybe the grandparents, I found that its AMAZING for photo books.
Then baby #2 arrives and while the husband and I continue to snap a bazillion and one pictures of our little love, his first year came and went and no baby book. Wah wah! It is so sad to say out loud, but creating a book for him completely fell off my radar. MOM FAIL right? Maybe its a the younger sibling right of passage? No joke, I have my baby book (baby #2 in the house) that my Mom gave me as an adult that has my name, birthday and how much I weighed written in it, but that was it!
In any case, I wish I was exaggerating when I say that as soon as babe #1 was old enough to understand what the book was, she and her brother would bring it out constantly to and flip through the pictures and giggle at what she did as a baby and ask questions about we had traveled to there. It was then that I realized it was time to make little brother's book. I was going to break the younger sibling no baby book tradition that had been happening in my family.
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When I sat down to create the DIY Baby book, it took a few days to put together and was at our door in a week or two. Our little love, now has his own super rad, super awesome baby photo book to flip through and giggle with his sister and ask all kinds of questions.
Being my second 150 page book I've created, I thought I would put together some key tips to making the whole process organized and fun.
How to Create a Photo Book in Blurb
Creating Your Book
Open Blurb website and first thing I recommend you doing is ordering a swatch kit. Get the paper swatches sent to you know what paper you want when you are ready to order. Takes the guesswork out.
Second move is to download their free Bookwright software. The do have an online drag and drop option if that is more your style, but I find that the software has so many more options and ways to create your book.
The software walks you through the process of deciding size and type of book you want. Both my baby books are 12x12, but they have lots of different sizes.
How Do You Organize Your Photos
I get this question all the time. I should I plan to write a whole post on this for you guys breaking it down, but for sake of simplicity here is what I do.
- Once a week or once every couple weeks, I download my pictures from my phone and camera to my hard drive. Get yourself an external hard-drive or cloud storage and get them off your phone and into folders either by day or month.
- I personally download pictures by day. I take so many pictures each day, that it is easier for me to see it chronologically.
- Once they are on the hard drive, I go through that week's pictures and sort. I sort them into trips, projects, or special occasions. For the baby book, I made a copy into a folder for our baby's first year by month.
Loading all the pictures into the book in the right order. The most efficient way I have found to create the book, was to only add one month of photos at a time.
Whether you organize your baby book photos before hand, or go into your monthly folder, on the spot and decide which ones you want to add, all pictures you add will appear on a top bar of the Bookwright software. While you can add all your pictures for the whole book all at once, I found it super difficult with knowing which month what pictures were taken.
When you add month by month, the software allows you to see all your pictures or just the ones you have not used in the book. This was super helpful as you layout your book. Decide whether you want all those pictures or not in your book.
After you are satisfied with the pictures you have added for that month? I found it super helpful to highlight any remaining photos that were not used and remove them from the software.
Then add the next month and run the same process.
Photo Book Layouts
There are a ton of pre-loaded page layouts depending on the number of pictures and text you want in your book. The great part about these layouts is that although they are pre-designed, they can be modified easily within the software. For instance you want a 9 square picture grid layout, but you only have 8 pictures for that page. You can leave one blank, or modify two pictures to different heights or widths to make up the space, or add text. Its super simple to modify.
Once you've created your meat of your DIY baby book, the software will walk you through the covers, the spine. Whether you want to add text, what time of cover. For both my books, I added the kids full name and birthday to the spine of the hardcover book.
Order your book. It will be the best feeling in the world when you hit send on that order. Blurb has so generously provided a 25% off discount code for you, my reader to get your started this month! Type in MADEWITHHAPPY in the promo code.
Terms & Conditions: *Offer valid through May 15, 2017(11:59 p.m. local time). Valid only for photo books uploaded to and purchased through your own account. A 25% discount is applied toward your product total with no minimum or maximum order amount. This offer is good for five uses, and cannot be used for digital purchases or combined with volume discounts, custom orders, other promotional codes, gift cards, or used for adjustments on previous orders.
What's the first Blurb book you are going to make?
I love our Blurb books so much that I can't wait to make the next one.
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