Family Photo Book for Toddlers

My nephew Kellan, who will be 2 years old in March, loves seeing pictures of his family, so I decided to make him a family photo book of his own for Christmas!

I visualized a brightly colored book - just like other kids books.  So I researched the idea of "green screen".  I use Corel Paint Shop Pro and I found a tutorial about using the "color changing tool" - instructions.  

Then I planned ahead and bought some green poster board at Dollar Tree.  When all my family was at my house for Thanksgiving Eve, I took a picture of each of them in front of the green poster board.  Then I wrote out my plan for the color layout of the book.

In the editing software I cropped to square (since I knew I wanted an 8x8 book) and changed the color of each picture.  

Kellan

Hadley

Henry

Lance

Me (Lyndi)

Josh

Gia

For the inside layout, I put each picture on a page by itself and on the opposite page, I put the name of each person.

The finished product was so fun and colorful and the perfect size for a toddler.  Kellan loved it!

Thrift Store Score - Books

1. CS Lewis popup book - I found this at a garage sale and since The Chronicles of Narnia are

favorites of mine, I wanted to buy it to introduce the stories to my niece and nephew.  My niece has LOVED it.  She's three, so she doesn't listed to the stories yet, but she loves playing with the pop-out 3D pages.

To buy this new would be $48.95, I paid only a few dollars.  If you have kids in your life and you can find this used - you definitely should buy it!

This is Hadley's favorite page!!

2. Musical Christmas books

There were a bunch of these at my local Goodwill in the summertime and they work perfectly - I bought one for my niece and nephew for Christmas! 



3. I've been collecting the Left Behind series in paperback version and it's been really fun to hunt for them.  I've found books 1-9 so far so.... I have only 7 more to find!