I have the best parents in the world. Really. I do. They love my son and my niece and nephew more than life itself, so I had no objection to my mom wanting to plaster pictures of them onto her walls at work. She works at a school, you see, and the walls inside her office are made of cinderblock. They are painted the same boring off-white that most public schools in America are covered in. Since her walls were pretty big and pretty bare, we decided to make her quite a large poster to help spruce the place up a bit.
She can't use nails to hang up regular frames, so we made it cinderblock friendly. Here's how.
1. DOWNLOAD MY FREE TEMPLATE:
I created this template in Photoshop Elements, and filled that bad boy up with tons of pictures of our sweet babies. I wanted it to be rather large, so the template is sized at 20x30 inches. (You can always resize if you want to make it smaller.)
2. ADD PHOTOS TO TEMPLATE USING PHOTOSHOP:
Easy peasy. Took me about 5 minutes once I chose all my pictures. Narrowing them down was definitely the hardest part of this whole project. There are great tutorials online for adding and clipping photos into a template if you need to brush up on your skills. (Use the magic of Google)
3. PRINT POSTER:
I luuuurve me some Costco, and they did an awesome job printing this at poster size for about $8.
4. MOUNT OR FRAME POSTER
Whadya know...$2 Elmer's foam core board from Wal-mart is almost exactly the same size as our 20x30 print! Since we can't use anything that would require nails to hang, we opted to go this route. You could just slap the poster on the wall with a little adhesive, or go the fancier route and put it in a poster frame.
For the foam core option, I used just a regular craft tape runner to stick it to the board. I made sure to put quite a bit around all the edges so they stay nice and crisp. The foam core was a teensy bit larger than the poster, so I used an exacto knife and ruler to cut off the excess. Since the edges of the template are white, you could totally skip this step and no one would really be the wiser.
The finished product ended up better than I was hoping for! Costco really does an amazing job printing this size, and the template's boxes are just the right size so nothing gets distorted when making the enlargements. Quite a few of these were cell phone photos, and they didn't look bad at all.
We used double sided foam tape for posters to hang it on the ciderblocks, and all those sweet babies sure do make her office a lot cuter!
OTHER WAYS TO USE:
-These would be adorable to make for parties/showers, and hang up temporarily as a fun decoration.
-show how much a baby/child has grown in the last year
-display engagement, maternity, or nursery photos at a shower
-Resize the whole template and use it in your scrapbook. Use the text tool in PS and add some journaling.
-Scan/take photos of your child's artwork and combine it all into one print to display.