Create a personalized photo album to give to your loved ones this Valentine’s Day. Spoonflower crew member Eloisa shares how to use PicMonkey to make your own!

Custom album covers

Thoughtful gifts for your loved ones are appropriate for any occasion, especially for Valentine’s Day! Surprise your friends and family with personalized photo albums by adding their names, photos, special colors and other embellishments with our woven wallpaper!

In this tutorial, I will be converting a dull, impersonal photo album to an awesome, special personalized present!

Things you will need:

  • Plain photo album (I found these at a popular craft store)

  • Ruler (to measure the album, this will help you determine how much woven paper you will need)

  • Woven wallpaper (for this 8″ x 11″ album, I used a swatch, which measures 12″ x 24″)

  • Scissors

  • Computer 

Designing the cover:

Album cover

1. The first thing to consider for creating this, is what size you will need for the cover. If you are covering the same size album that I did, a woven wallpaper swatch will suffice. If your album is bigger, you may need to order 2ft of wallpaper. I created a graphic to fit my 8″ x 11″ album, plus a couple of inches surrounding it so the woven paper can be folded inside the cover. If you have the same sized album that I used, the striped background graphic can be downloaded here.

Uploading book cover

2. Once you download the file in your computer, you will upload it to our website.

Editing with PicMonkey

3. Next, click on the “Edit with Picmonkey” button, your image will be taken to the Picmonkey website at this point. Picmonkey, although not associated with Spoonflower, is a great free online tool to enhance your images and ensemble graphics that you can then turn into fabric and wallpaper when uploaded to our website.

Editing with PicMonkey

4. In Picmonkey, you can add photos, graphics, and fonts to your design. For this tutorial, I will be designing a front space and a spine, but you can add more things to your design if you would like! I will start with the spine. The spine of a book is the edge where the pages are bound, this is the part of the book that you can see when you stack them in a bookshelf, so, you should include in this area the name of your book, or something that will describe it.

5. For my books, I used the OVERLAY TOOL (it looks like a butterfly) to cover the red marks I added to the graphic to help mark the center of the paper. Using these guides, I added my banner. 

Adding design elements

6. You can change the color, size and position of the overlays, in this case, I will  be making the banner hot pink, will also resize it, move it to the top of the center dot and rotate it as to be in the same position as the book spine. Then, so it does not move around while adding more things, I clicked on “combine all elements”. NOTE: if you ever make a mistake, Picmonkey has “back buttons” that will allow for you to undo your steps}.

Editing with PicMonkey

7. Next, I added text on top of the banner, you will find the TEXT TOOL on the left hand side, on top of the overlay tool. In this case, I used the “Sketch Block” font, which is only available with a paid subscription (around $35.00 per year, but you can use any other free font too!)

Adding design elements

8. For the front of your album, you can add a meaningful photo. To accomplish this, you will need the OVERLAY tool once again. To use your own image, you can click on the “YOUR OWN” button, find the image in your computer and place it around where the other red marking dot is.

Editing with PicMonkey

9. Add some flare to your design with one, or many of the awesome ready-made overlays. For this I added another banner, fonts, “tape”, hearts and stars.

Ordering from Spoonflower

10. Once you have completed embellishing your images, you will click SAVE. This will bring you to the Spoonflower website, where you will be able to order your woven wallpaper. Once you receive it you can simply cover your album with it!

Scrapbook stickers

I also took advantage of the overlay buttons on Picmonkey and created a design that we then used to cut up and use as embellishment stickers to give the album pages a scrapbook feel!