Photo book as gift for LO?

[amldaley]

I want to put together an album for 16 mo dd for X-mas. One photo per page, all our family and her daycare friends.

Anyone done this?

Use a regular album with clear pages covers?

Scrapbook style?

Order from a site? I am worried she will rip the pages.

I would LOVE to do a boardbook style, but I gotta think that would be pricey!

Ideas? Advice? BTDT?

[jent]

This is a great gift. DD has two-- one is a cheapie photo album I bought at CVS. The other is a Kodak Gallery one (I think the mini photo book). The mini photo book starts at about $10; the pages are a thick paper that doesn't tear easily, though DD hasn't really tried (I made it when she was about 20 months).

Oh, and her daycare teachers made one with photos printed on regular paper, glued on construction paper, and then each page laminated. They used yarn to tie the whole thing together. Indestructible and DD loves this one. I keep meaning to find out, though, how do you get things laminated?

I was thinking of doing another or even a few more for Xmas, so if people have other ideas, I'd love to hear them.

[newnana]

I've done this a few ways:

Scrapbook style with plastic page liners. This I did as an ABC book with one letter per page and a picture of her along with a corresponding item to that letter and then some embellishments with other things from that letter.
ETA: this one was less durable because DD liked to stick her hand down the plastic liners to feel the embellishments.

Photo site hardcover book: these are so much easier than scrapbooking. DD was probably 2 when she got her first one of these. I did it with a buy one get one free coupon so that if she tore some pages on accident in hers it wouldn't be a big deal. Turns out the pages were pretty durable and it hasn't been a problem, so the second copy went to my parents as a gift (I also had done captions describing the scenes and participants so as she gets older its all there).

I think this is a great idea. Kids love to be the center of the story.

[billysmommy]

We did one for each of the boys for the Christmas they were 1.5. We got them from mypublisher.com and did them in the Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See format but used their names instead.

They came out really cute and they love to read them

[ourbabygirl]

I did a Shutterfly 8x8 photo book for DD for her 1st birthday (ordered it way ahead of time to have it for her party, so it only included in-womb up to 10 months). It turned out *super* cute, and we have it sitting on the coffee table... she likes to look at it but I don't really let her handle it by herself, for fear of ripping the pages. It's nice to have for guests to look at, too.

[doberbrat]

do a boardbook. its really not that expensive or difficult. I made them for dd and her friends last year for Christmas and they were a huge hit.

buy the boardbooks from

http://www.barebooks.com/chunky.htm

and the instructions for doing them are here:

http://peppermintcreative.com/blog/?p=535

I had a difficult time working w/the modgepodge and the spray worked much better for me.


One tip to think about is printing costs. the 8x8 books are nice but printing pictures in 8x8 is harder to find reasonably. not a big deal for 1 book but if you're doing a bunch, it might get more expensive than you were planning. I did mine using winkflash printing 5x5 - the prints were $0.25ea.

I think barebooks has a $20min so buy extras and plan on making it a yearly thing or doing some for her friends/siblings etc. and plan on making 1 as a "tester" to get a feel for the materials etc.

I used my scrapbooking software to put captions on the pics - X's trip to the Children's Museum, Ice Cream at the Science Center etc. and since I had alot of pics of the kids together, I just used the same images for most of the books. Each child got their own cover and a pic of THEIR family and some customization but 1/2 of the books were done using the same images.