With blogs and pinterest and etsy to browse through, there are so many creative ways of announcing big milestones in your life — engagements, save the dates, graduations, and of course, pregnancies and new babies! After browsing lots of options, we opted for a photobooth style announcement that we made entirely from our living room with no special equipment or photographers.
Let me back up for a sec. I love announcements that incorporate photos. All of these below are just photos with some sort of text and/or graphics applied on top. You could totally DIY these using a photo editing software like PicMonkey. (PS – you can check out my whole baby-related pinterest board here).
As you saw in our baby news blog post, we ended up going with the photostrip idea. Frankly, I liked the easiness of this option. It was the middle of winter, so there weren’t going to be any fabulous outdoor photoshoots happening.
To create our photostrip, we had a friend take a few photos in our living room (thanks andy!). I created the signs we held on regular white paper with a black Sharpie (nothing fancy!). In retrospect, we could have just held blank white sheets and I could have applied the text afterwards using the software. We held up the different sheets and did a few shots with each to have a bit of choice. Then it was just about photo editing.
As I mentioned, I use PicMonkey– a free online photo editing tool – and it’s awesome. Besides the regular editing stuff (cropping, rotating, touch ups, etc), it has a whole host of specialized tools: filters, adding text, adding graphics, etc. And if you upgrade to the Royale version (which is only like $50 a year) you get access to even more fonts, overlays, filters, etc. I totally recommend it!!
I wanted the photos to look vintage-y, so after cropping them, I applied some filters (“tranquil” and “cross process”) to each. Therefore turning the photos from looking like this…
…to this! The “puzzled” look on Danny’s face here makes me totally giggle. What a freak. 
I saved the four photos and then created them as a collage (again, using Pic Monkey). I kept playing with the aspect ratio until I got it looking like a photostrip – it ended up as 333 x 1000 pixels.
And voila!
A fun little photo announcement to send around to friends and family, post on facebook, and on the blog! For family members of ours who don’t have internet access, we printed out a few copies on cardstock at Staples (cost us less than $5), cut them to size, and then popped them in the mail.
Have you guys ever DIY’d a photostrip? Done any cute photo announcements? In other news, what are you up to this weekend? It’s supposed to be pretty sunny and warm here (for Ontario in March, anyway!), so I’m ready to go on some nice long walks.