I’m always on the lookout for something different to use with photos, especially for a gift. You can imagine my surprise and excitement to find leggings on Zazzle available for photocrafting! Needless to say, I couldn’t wait to create a pair. I decided to do a pair for the mother of a toddler and away I went. The leggings arrived in good time and looked great — the fabric is a good quality and the images were clear. I took them to my own yoga class for show and tell. One person who loved them said she didn’t have children but it would be fun to use photos of her dog.
This is a much more interesting creative process than many photocrafting projects. It requires some planning! The good news? There’s a quick and easy method. The challenging news? It’s a wonderful project for those of you with some artistic flair and imagination.
The quick and easy method is the familiar one. Use the “Create Your Own Leggings” template, pick a photo, upload it, make any minor adjustments, order the item! You may want to take a little more time than uploading a photo to something like a blanket. Trying out a variety of different photos is part of the fun! (For those of you who do your own artwork, you can upload your own marvelous designs.)
For my first one-photo design, I chose an outdoor scene and uploaded it to the leggings template on Zazzle. Note that the template crops the image to a square but you have the ability to move the underlying photo around. There are lines to show you the outline for the leggings so you have some flexibility in what part of the image appears where.
The front view looks good! 
The sides are good… 
…with a tree up the legs. 
The back seam connects the two edges of the photo.
It’s easy and fun to try different photos. I liked the scenery of the lake and trees near Banff but wanted to try people and drawings.
The 6″x4″ photo gets cropped to a square image. 
For a gift, I decided to make the 16-photo leggings you see in the first image above. In retrospect, I think it wasn’t the best choice. I’m not sure I want actual people on my leggings and for sure not as lots of faces. Also, I think maybe the simpler designs, e.g. the one-photo leggings are perhaps prettier. I personally like each of the examples above.
I wanted to try a multi-photo template with scenery rather than faces. I decided on the Zazzle 8-photo template. I decided to try scenery rather than faces or people. i chose several different sunset photos I’d taken in Seaside, OR, including the four at the right here.
The easiest approach is to use the Personalize button and “change” each of the templates photos for one of your photos (either from your previously uploaded photos or by uploading). Each of these templates is designed by a Zazzle artist and it may be worth writing to them for hints. I did and got a speedy response. I learned that it’s easiest to use square photos so a bit of cropping was necessary before uploading.
If you want to do more, you can further customize the design with “Click to customize further” at the bottom of the Personalize menu. That brings up the familiar outline of the leggings with each photo listed and displayed. There’s lots of flexibility available. Here I’ve selected one of the images that occupied 4 “squares” in the template (as designed) and reduced it to a small size with black filling in the extra space. I strongly recommend that you not go to the further customization until you have used the Personalize menu to change each of the template photos for those of your own.
Shel suggests using color photos where the colors work well with each other, e.g. different pictures of wildflowers. She also suggests alternating the photos on a grid with a pattern or use blocks so it breaks up the photos. She’s seen the same photo repeated over and over in the grid effectively. Hopefully this will start your creative juices flowing. I think I don’t have enough creative artistic talent to tackle the multi-photo templates so I’ll be happy with the results I can achieve with a single photo. However you do it, having personalized leggings is very fun! Now is a good time to begin thinking about holiday gift giving and a good time to tackle a potentially more challenging project. Send us photos of your creation or post them on our Instagram account!
P.S. Many thanks to Unsplash and photographers Brandon Jean and Jude Beck for providing the photos of the lake and the family at the beach.
Photocrafting Fun 
Great idea! I love the scenic leggings, but any grandmother brave enough to wear leggings would love seeing grandkids’ faces everywhere!
The beach towels and the leggings are both really unusual and clever ways to use photos. thanks for sharing this!
Terrific idea! (Though I like the non-people ones better than the photos 🙂 )
It sounds as though you do all the work, right — layout and all?
So glad you like it! (I agree about the scenery or art as the preferred designs.) You can use the template and merely change your photos for the template photos — almost no work! But there’s plenty of possibility for artistic manipulation that’s beyond me.