This little project was inspired by a few different pins, but particularly this one who links to this great site, Printstagram, where you can turn your Instagrams into cute little books! Well SOMEONE can, but not me because Instagram has not yet come to Android (though I hear it is imminent!). Anyhow, not enjoying being left out of the cute little book party, I decided to make my own.
I started out by making a template in photoshop: 3 rows of 4 2-inch squares and 580×580 photos that fit handily into the squares with just a nice little white border. Print and cut out. [wpdm_file id=1]
Next you cut out the photos in little strips 4×1.
And then you fold them like so. The first and last pages will be glued to the outside of the books and should probably remain blank, but of course that’s up to you.
Next you need to glue the accordion-folded pieces into back-to-back pages. Then you adjoin the sections together, gluing the back of the first page of the strip to the back of the last page of the previous strip, etc. You can add somewhat unlimited pages by just doing sets of 4×1 without blanks and continuing to adjoin them to the first and last strip. But of course after a time this would get too thick and be hard to cover.
Next you’ll cut the cover. You can use cardstock or cardboard or ideally, tagboard which is somewhere between the two. It is what you find on the back of a pad of paper. It’s thin enough to cut with scissors which is nice, but holds up well against bending. Once it is cut, you could wrap it with scrapbook paper or similar for a nicer finish or leave the surface unadorned as I did.
Next you glue the pages into the book. It’s probably a good idea to clamp the whole thing for a while with a binder clip or similar so it dries well.
A little decor for the front in the form of a simple stamp.
The most tedious part of this project was getting the template setup. Beyond that it was super quick and took me about 30 minutes. The most important thing in this project is to be precise with cutting, folding and gluing. It will make or break it as far as finish goes. Next time I do this I would like to use our nice color printer at work where it’s a nice glossy finish instead of the grainy finish on paper.
Check out all of the other great Pinteractive projects on Nannette’s site!