Printing DIY Polaroid Photographs : So Easy!

We all have so many photographs, ones that we have snapped on our phones, but are such treasured captured moments in time, or large albums of images on our pc’s and laptops of our latest trips away, you know the ones taken on our big cameras.  It’s such a shame though, that these just remain where they are, as in reality so many of them do.  I wanted to share with you how I am going to free up those photographs from their electronic homes, and print them off to display in my home in the style of a Polaroid camera photograph.

First up choose the image you would like, and download it to a site called PicMonkey -http://www.picmonkey.com/

To make a Polaroid photo it works best on fairly square images, or where the part of the image that you wish to print is in the center of the frame.  If for example you have a very long and portrait image, it would be advisable at this point to crop the image.  You can do all of this from within PicMonkey, but just experiment until you get the knack.

So lets start with this image of a teddybear.  Even though it is portrait, its not too long so should work well.

Whilst on PicMonkey, on the left handside you will see different effects that you can give an image.  Choose the Polaroid frame, from the options in the frame section.  Here is how it would look:

 

So simple to do, you can rotate the frame too if you need it.  There are three effects available, a plain white, more grey tone and a weathered vintage look.

All you need to now is print them out. I copied them to my desktop and then to a Word document. I just needed to make them slightly smaller to fit whilst they are in Word, ideally two to a page I found. Then simply cut them out of the photo paper. You will notice that they have a filter on them too which really give them an authentic vintage look.

 

I have a HP instant ink package, I wrote about it last year. In short this means once I’d bought my HP printer (I have the HP Envy 5530) and then I subscribed to instant ink, which costs from 1.99 per month, and you can have ink then delivered directly to you door.  For 1.99 you can have upto 50 pages printed out per month.  Your printer communicates once it requires more ink, and it is mailed to you, when your printer is running out. The ink that is sent isn’t poor quality though, in fact the quality of the printing is brilliant! I attended a HP event recently and we got to test it out and compare it to other inks, it is seriously impressive!

So once you have printed out your DIY Polaroids you can use them for all sorts of things, check out my Pinterest page on Wall Art for some ideas :

Follow Amanda Cottingham’s board Wall Art on Pinterest.

How about something simple like decorating your fridge door? I unfortunately don’t have a magnetic fridge door, but livened up my fridge at the side like this.  Because its so reasonable to print these out I can keep it up to date and ever changing as we do different thinks throughout the year.

 

 

Go forth and print some off, set those photographs free, I would love to see the results!