Getting crafty with photos

January 27, 2015 Sarah 0 Comments

I'm a big fan of vintage stuff and repurposing old things. This weekend I finally found some time for a project that was high on my to do list. A couple of years ago we made a table out of a letterpress tray. At the time I filled it up with scrapbook paper that fitted in with the colors in our home. One of my new years resolutions was to get more of my photos printed and on display. That's how the idea of putting my photos in our coffee table was born. 

Creating a coffee table like this is pretty easy. Buy a letterpress tray, some table legs and a glass table top. Screw (or glue) the legs under your letterpress tray and add the glass table top (we used some non-slip dots between the glass and tray). You can finish the table by painting it, we decided to keep the original colors. 

Most of the time I'm pretty unorganized about doing things. I get so enthusiastic that I just start doing stuff without thinking things trough. This time I took some time to find a system that would allow me to change the images in a quick way in the future.

I started of with measuring the tray and making a photoshop template from those measurements. Make sure your document has the same size as your table and resolution 300 pixels/inch (the right dpi for printing). Not mentioned in the video tutorial is that you can give your rectangles an exact measurement in the properties menu. I didn't care about the spacing between the images, because I had to cut out all the images once printed

I already had my favorite images selected and ready for print from the time I made my albums. So I just had to open them and fit them in. Once finished I flattened my images and opened some new documents (I needed 9 to get it all printed) in the size I wanted to print. In Europe we use A4 sized paper, for your printer another size might be more logical. Then copy your flattened document into your new documents until you have all your images ready for print. To save some ink you can delete the images that are not completely on the page. Select with the rectangle selection tool and press delete. Now you can print all these pages. Cut out all the images and place them in the tray. Get some cookies and thee and enjoy your work! Marlow loves talking about all the images and it's fun to play "I spy with my little eye"!