DIY Alphabet Book

Dear Readers,
I'd been wanting to make Elliot a special ABC book for awhile. Ever since we first read through the one we have at home and found weird things like "J is for Jam Tart" (seriously, what the heck is a jam tart??). I thought it would be fun for him to learn his ABCs through things he actually recognizes from around the house. So one afternoon while he napped, I went around snapping pictures and then designed a book. I am so in love with how it turned out that I decided to share it with you all!

So this book was actually pretty easy to make. The first step is to simply take pictures of things in your world that start with the letters in the alphabet. Whenever possible, I tried to think of things that would be useful for Elliot to know someday. For a few of the letters, I used people (and animals!) he knows vs. things:

Some of my other favorite pictures were just of things in our house and backyard:

To design the pages, I used picmonkey.com. I just cropped all the pictures into squares and added the text to the corners. 

Then, I used Shutterfly to create the book itself (though you could use just about any photo printing company). I chose an 8X8 photo book and simply uploaded my already designed my ABC pictures as the pages. 

I also designed a cover that looks like this:

And a title page that looks like this:

Look at that--my dreams of being a published author have finally come true ;)

My awesome friend Kerri was sweet enough to give me a promo code she had for a free photo book, so all I had to pay for was shipping! Shutterfly has deals on photo books all the time, but right now their 8X8 books are on sale for $14.99. You can also get a $100 credit a Picaboo (another photo printing place like Shutterfly) for $35 on Living Social right now if you want to make, like, a bunch of books!

I had so much fun with this project, and from the looks of it, El is pretty happy with his new book too:

Have a great week everyone!

XOXO,

Kristin