Since posting Ava’s birthday party photos back in March, I have received a handful of e-mails asking how I created the Polaroids used in the table scape. I have found myself typing the same e-mail over and over and thought it might be helpful to actually show a how-to. It was really easy to create the Polaroids and added such a fun touch to the party.
I have to admit that like any good idea these days, heavy perusing of Pinterest was involved. I was browsing for party ideas one afternoon and came across this blog post featuring a first birthday party. I loved lots of things about the party, but I kept coming back to the strings of Polaroids. It was such a cute idea, and since I only had a zillion photos of Ava’s first year, I figured a project like that was right up my alley. A few days later I saw this advent calendar on Pinterest and two great ideas merged into one.
The first part of creating my frames was choosing the photos. I scoured my personal photos from Ava’s first year and copied them into a folder of my favorites. I consolidated some of the steps below in order to be more efficient, but this is an outline of how I created each one.
1. Drag the photo into Photoshop. I do realize that not everyone has a copy of Photoshop. There might be another program that allows you to do the same thing in a different way, but PS was my go to.
2. Select the crop tool and crop your photo. Based on the standard size of a Polaroid, I cropped to 3 x 3.
3. Open a blank document to create the printable version of your photo. I wanted the layout to be exact so that there was no guess work during printing. The most inexpensive option for me was a 4 x 6.
4. Open another blank documents to create the white space of your Polaroid. Based on the standard size of a Polaroid, I modified my photo to 3.5 x 4.25
5. Using the dotted square tool (I have no idea what the real names of anything are!), I outlined the document that would become the white base of my Polaroid and created a thin stroke. You’ll see in a second how this helped provide a definite border to the Polaroid.
6. You can’t see the stroke line, but it is there. Using the pointer tool, I clicked on my image and dragged it onto the document that would become the white base of my Polaroid. I tried to get an even amount of white space around the top and sides, leaving extra white space at the bottom so that it had that “Polaroid” look to it.
7. I flattened the image (CTRL+E) and dragged the Polaroid onto the 4 x 6 canvas using the pointer tool.
8. I saved each 4 x 6 image as a .jpg file. All of my images printed like you see below, so the last step was to manually trim them with a scrapbook cutting board.
I found the wooden frames at Hobby Lobby during one of their 50% off sales. The miniature clothes pins came from there too. I super-glued jute/twine to the frame as my “clothesline” and covered the ends with pink buttons. After all of the trimming and gluing, it took me just about a whole day to complete this project. Of course, I meticulously measured every single aspect of the project, so if you aren’t super OCD like me, you could probably do it in less time. Or you can hang the Polaroids from the window like Chenin Boutwell did. That turned out super cute too!
I hope that helps! It is harder than you might think to screen capture and write a detailed tutorial, so if you are interested in this project and have any questions or notice that I left out an important detail, please let me know. Happy creating!
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by Amanda
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