Last year, my husband turned the big 35 and I wanted to do some fun decor for his milestone birthday. I ended up creating a really cool pennant with photos of him growing up and streaming it in the living room. But that is another post coming soon...
This year, our friend Noah (who's birthday is a few days before the hubby's) and Jamie wanted to hold a joint birthday party. I volunteered to create a photo booth area to try to up my game from last year. At first, I thought about ordering cut outs of the guys but when I had gone online to price things out, most websites wanted to charge $200! S.A.D.F.A.C.E.
So my second thought was to create a photobooth background. Who doesn't love a photobooth at their party! We had one at our wedding and it was a fabulously (and fairly tips-ied) good time! We have the copies of all the pictures as proof! I know that trying to print a color poster anywhere bigger than an standard sized poster (11x17) would be a ridiculous amount of money. So I thought it would be best if I tried to print out the background on our color printer and put them together like a jigsaw puzzle. After doing a test run with a smaller sized poster, I found that the quality isn't what I was looking for.
Enter Kinkos.
I went into Kinkos thinking that there was nothing they could do. After going through my options, most being $200+ (fancy vinyl poster, colored paper poster, etc), I was about ready to just plop down the $200+ dollars and call it a day. But then I had told the clerk my idea about printing it on my own printer and he said that they could print it out and it the quality would be better than a home printer. So, I gave him the giant file and he printed it. All 48 sheets. BOOYAH! Kinkos is awesome. They've helped me on more than one occasion with big print jobs but this one took the cake.
Total spent at Kinko's (with tax): $31.24
Here is what the image looked like when I took it home from Kinko's. There are 8 pages across, 6 pages down = 48 pages total. As you can also see, there is a white border around each of the pages so I had to cut each border off individually. I believe Kinko's can cut them off for you but I didn't ask at that time. Maibad.
Then, with the advice from Noah's wife, Jamie, I headed to the dollar store to buy foam board so that I could take the 48 sheets of paper and attach them to boards so that it would be easier to assemble before the party. I bought 12 sheets of foam board total. I was thinking I'd only have to use 9 but bought 3 more just in case.
Total at the Dollar Store: $12 (and some photobooth props: $8) = $20
I thought it was going to be simple after that. That I could paste 6-9 pages onto each board and then fasten them together. Boy was I WRONG. The foam boards are 20x30 and the sheets were less than a full sized sheet of paper. So each foam board had small pieces and large pieces and I had to be careful about placing them or the entire picture could be thrown off. And when you have people in the image, you want to make sure no one is missing an eye and to make sure their nose is in the right spot. I used rubber cement to attach the paper to the boards. I found it was easy to pick the paper up off the board and replace it if I used it sparingly in the corners at first. Then, when I got all the pieces down, I covered the back in glue.
1 bottle of rubber cement glue was $2.99 at Joann's.
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| That's me...placing each cut piece onto the foam board. :) |
The poster stood 7 feet across and 4 feet high. The foam boards were attached with packing tape on the backside and stapled into a 2x4 so that was it elevated. Here is the background in an un-cropped photo. The background was set in the garage and you can see that its set up high so that the bottom doesn't show.
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| The birthday boys! |
And here it is, the final finished product!
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| Yes, I do this in a lot of photos I take :) |
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| Jamie and our friend Chelsea. :) I bought fairy wings, funny glasses and all sorts of other stuff as props for the photobooth. |
Total spent at Joann's for glue: $2.99
Total spent at Kinko's (with tax): $31.24
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TOTAL: $54.33 (give or take a few dollars for tax)
TOTAL TIME SPENT (cutting, pasting, etc): 4-5 hours done over the course of two days.
Items needed:
7ft x 4ft backdrop = 48 tiled sheets of printed paper from Kinkos.
9 foamboards from the Dollar Store.
1 bottle of rubber cement.
Any type of heavy tape to attach the foam boards together.
Some way to hang the finished product (possible methods):
a) Staple the top of the board to a 2x4 and clamp the sides down.
b) Hang the finished image from a light stand with clamps.
Hope you enjoyed my DIY! I'd love to hear how you made your own photobooth background as well!
