Making a Paper Photo Quilt

Making your own paper photo quilt can be a great way to display your family's favorite pictures. It is easy enough to make that even the small children in your family can participate. Scrapbook pages, construction paper, and even plain white paper is easy to customize in whatever theme you wish to use for your family's paper photo quilt.

Making a paper photo quilt: Gather your pictures

The first thing to do is gather up an assortment of pictures to use for your family's paper photo quilt. You can make your entire paper quilt in one theme if you have enough related photos or you can devote different sections of the quilt to each theme or family member. Once you have a good selection of photos, it is time to decide on the paper background you will be using for the pieces of the quilt.

Making a paper photo quilt: Using scrapbook pages

Scrapbook paper can be a great choice for paper photo quilts because it is already designed to hold photographs. This type of photo paper also comes with a wide variety of colors, patterns, and borders, making it easy to find a scrapbooking theme that fits with your family paper photo quilt. Scrapbook paper can usually be purchased in individual sheets, so you can mix and match different themes for different photos. This works especially well for holiday-themed paper photo quilts since there are many different holiday backgrounds available in scrapbook paper.

Making a paper photo quilt: Construction or white paper

If you prefer to decorate the pages of your paper photo quilt yourself (or allow your children to decorate them), plain white paper or colored construction paper can work as well as the scrapbooking pages. Two contrasting colors of construction paper can be used to accent the photographs. Simply cut out shapes or borders of the second color and glue these accents onto the colored background of the paper quilt's pieces. Your children can then add their own custom lettering, drawing, or even a favorite sticker.

Making a paper photo quilt: Connecting the pieces

To assemble the paper photo quilt, lay out the individual pieces in your desired design. It is usually easiest to use a rectangular grid shape for your photo quilt, but irregular shaped pieces will also work as long as they are uniform in size. Punch a hole in the edge of each piece where it connects to an adjacent piece, making sure the holes line up so the yarn can be tied as a connector. Place the two pieces of the paper photo quilt so that the holes lie on top of each other. Using an 8-12 inch piece of ribbon or yarn, run this through the punched holes and tie off in a bow. Repeat everywhere that two pieces are touching until you have a completed paper photo quilt.