Making A Book With HP Instant Ink

This post is sponsored by HP Instant Ink. Thank you, HP!

Annabel is absolutely OBSESSED with making books. When this first started, her books were usually the plots of movies and TV shows she’d seen, illustrated by photos we found on the internet. As time has gone on, she’s started to create her own stories – sometimes with existing characters (fan fic!), and sometimes with original characters. They are pretty funny.

As much as I love her stories, I internally groan a little when she asks me if she can make a book because they are pretty ink-heavy. We’ve run out of ink on more than one occasion, and then not only can I not print out things for work, we can’t make more books – the horror! So I jumped at the chance to sign up for HP Instant Ink. With HP Instant Ink, my printer orders ink when the levels get low, and the new ink arrives at my doorstep before the current cartridges are empty. If that wasn’t cool enough, the service can save subscribers up to 50% on ink. What a time to be alive, my friends.

Annabel had been asking to make a book about our trip to Hawaii, so I thought it was a good opportunity to make her books look a little bit nicer. First, I gathered the materials:

~A printer (I have the Envy 5660, it works with Instant Ink)
~Photo paper
~Colored card stock
~Decorative tape
~Needle and thread
~HP Social Media Snapshots Sticky Photo Paper (or any other sticker you’d like)

Annabel and I put together a little video on how you make a book (written instructions are below).

~Annabel and I sat down together and she carefully went through my photo files to pick out her favorite photos. I laid them out in my photo editing software (word processing software also works) and she dictated her words to me.

~Once we had all the pages, we printed them out. I then took the needle and thread and stitched a binding through the papers. This is what truly holds the book together. (If you really can’t use a needle and thread, staples work well. I won’t tell.)

~We then used sparkly washi tape to cover the thread and make a nice-looking binding.

~I had this super-cool sticker paper called HP Social Media Snapshots Sticky Photo Paper, so we used it to print up one of my Instagram photos and Annabel stuck it on the cover.

That’s it! Easy, and it looks much nicer than the earlier books she’s made.

Here are some of the pages from inside Annabel’s book about our trip:

Annabel loooooves her book and even had us print out a few more copies for our other family members who went on the trip (and I never ran out of ink, such magic!). She’s had us read her this book every night before bed! I don’t mind…it’s nice to relive Annabel’s favorite moments from our trip.

HP wants you to try Instant Ink for yourself! Get three months of FREE ink when you purchase an eligible printer and sign up online for HP Instant Ink!