Hellobee

My favorite of all of the gifts I have given my boys is the personalized ABC books I made for each of their first birthdays. The boys love looking at them, I had fun making them, and they make a great keepsake.

I am a huge fan of photo books in general. I’ve shared before how I made each of their baby books as a photo book and I really want to start making a photo book every year of our family’s photos. One of the great things about these ABC books is they are super simple to put together even if you hate trying to design photo books. Each page is just one big photo and a word.

To make my books, I started by listing all of the letters of the alphabet and brainstorming words I could use for each letter. Then I looked through all of the photos I already had and started matching them up to letters of the alphabet. Most of the photos I used are of the boys themselves – we all know toddlers love to look at photos of themselves! A few were photos of favorite toys or family members.

Some were obvious – like Y for yawn. But most photos can work for several different words depending on what letters you still need. For example, a photo of the baby at the lake could work for lake, water, outside, or swim.

After going through all of our photos, there were still a few tough letters that I needed something for, so I took a few photos specifically to fit certain letters.

Also, the letter X is so stinking hard. You can pretty much use xylophone or just cheat a little bit. I ended up just using explore for X. It doesn’t technically start with X but close enough. And the letter Z is simply zzzzz with a cute sleeping picture in each book.

For the cover of my books, I took a photo of my sons’ alphabet blocks.

I have used both Shutterfly and Blurb to make my books and they both turned out nicely. (The pages with the white border at the bottom were made with Shutterfly; the ones with the whole page photos were made with Blurb.) Personally I prefer Shutterfly because I prefer their design program and I love that they constantly have amazing sales.

I keep my boys’ abc books on the bookshelves in our living room so they have held up pretty well, but 4.5 year old Finn’s book has gotten quite a bit of use over the years so some of the pages are definitely showing some wear and tear.

Another option is to have your photo book printed as a board book. You can do this using Pinhole Press or Pint Size Productions, but I don’t have any experience with either personally. I like that the board book option would last longer, but I couldn’t find any board book options that allow for 26 pages, so you would have to double up on the letters of the alphabet or skip a few.