I think I saw this DIY I Spy Book about a million years ago (or perhaps some iteration of it, as this was posted only just this past May) but I stumbled upon it again today, and then followed some links to the tutorial and immediately I was smitten AND empowered – After seeing how she made hers and how inexpensive it actually was to put together, I found myself thinking “I can make this!” and then immediately set about proving that theory true.

I decided to try out the concept with some of BB’s pretty hair things. I took about a million pictures of this basic set up, struggled with lighting, argued with my camera but eventually got a shot good enough to work with.

Then I started taking the pictures of individual items within the mass and made a collage of the best shots:

So these would be the things to spy.

Things of note:

• Some of the things I took pictures of are partly cropped out in the image above. I guess I should have taken more pictures of individual items or perhaps chosen my best pic first and then gone back and found the individual items to spy?
• This particular example is also dreadfully easy given the large size of most of the items or the fact that there are multiples of some things.
• Although for a two year old, that might be a good thing – maybe I should make an effort to make BB’s easier and MM’s harder?
• I need to do the rest of these in a place with better lighting because photo editing only got me so far. A lot of my pictures were simply unusable.
• Thankfully I have 5 months to get this right.

I do think it will be pretty cute when I’m done though.

Wanna make one for your kids? Check out Delia Creates for the full tutorial!