Make your own photo birth announcements

Materials used to make your own photo birth announcements:

8 1/2" by 11" cardstock
embellishment paper
20 lb. or cardstock paper
20 lb. plain white paper
in a seperate color

1 or 2 baby pictures
glue stick

A photo birth announcement like this one I created is by far a great keepsake. When friends and family members recieve something like this they hang on to it. It makes it's way into a photo album or a scrapbook. People like to frame them and hang them on the wall or up on their mantles. They put them on the fridge for everyone to see! :) I should know since I have several baby pictures, announcements and christmas postcards hanging on my fridge and on my mantle. Some have been there for years. A couple have made it through moving from apartment to apartment just to find their way right back onto the fridge!

There are several ways to go about adding the actual photo to these photo birth announcements. You can go the more expensive route and use an actual photo print. I chose to simply print pictures from my digital camera straight onto regular printer paper. I then trimmed them out and glued them onto another small sheet of paper to creata a frame around the picture.

STEP 1: Laying out your text. Not a great challenge here. Just figure out how you want to word your announcements (I provide a little help in my baby announcement wording section ). Make sure you allign the text centered and then just print it as many times as you can fit it on one page (as you will be cutting it out later anyway). If you set up a couple columns on the page you will be able to fit twice as many announcements text to a page. Print them out onto plain white paper.

STEP 2: Photos! If you plan on using actual photo prints you can either simply glue them straight onto the announcement, or you can choose to attach them using scrapbooking photo corners. If you choose to use the photo corners the announcement then becomes a small gift as the recipient can remove the photo and keep it in their wallet or photo album.
Otherwise you can do as I did and print photos from your digital camera. (I went one step forward and downloaded the photos to Photoshop to manipulate them to crop them and change their size to fit exactly as I wanted. For those who don't know, Photoshop is a software made just for this kind of task).

STEP 3: Paper cutting. Once you have printed out your photos (preferably several photos on one page to conserve paper) you will then trim them all out to be ready to attatch to the announcements.
You will have several other sheets of paper to be cut. For starters would be the cardstock base of the card. If your cardstock is sized at 8 1/2" by 11" (which is the standard size usually) then all that need be done is to cut them into quarters. Next would be the embellishment paper which will be the next layer to the card. This will also be cut into quarters but will be trimmed just a little smaller than the cardstock so that when you glue it down to the cardstock there will be a small border of color peeking through. Next piece to cut out will be the photo's "frame" which you will cut to be slightly larger than the size of your picture. The size will be determined by you depending on the size of picture you choose.
last you will trim out the announcent text.

The easiest way to execute this step in the process of making photo birth announcements would be to cut all the pieces out by hand for the very first announcement you make. Then once you figure out all the dimensions, take your announcements and all of the different papers and pieces to a local copy or print shop and pay to have them cut for you on a machine. It is quite inexpensive and worth all the tedious work you will save yourself from doing.

STEP 4: Glue it all together! The best way to go about this would be to use a glue stick. A craft glue would create a messy wrinkled look.
The cardstock squares will be the base of the photo birth announcements cards. I would start by glueing the photos onto their seperate "frame" base. Once these are all glued the next step to take would be to glue your embellishment paper onto the cardstock. Next glue your photo and frame onto the card. Make sure and place it at the top of the announcement centered, but with a little of the cardstock and embellishment paper still showing on either sides.
Last but not least glue down the announcement text paper centered just below the photo and your done. Let it all dry!

Don't wanna go through all this trouble to make your birth announcements. For an easier way to make your own photo birth announcements check out this site which allows you to create, edit and add photos to your own printable birth announcement.

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