DIY Custom Rubik's Cube

My husband has wanted a custom Rubik's Cube for quite a while now. I thought about using vinyl and using en exacto knife to cut through the pieces so that they would fit on the individual squares. Then, I found custom sticker sets on the Rubik's cube website. They are pretty reasonably priced, around $6 for a kit that will make 10 customized cubes. From reading on the website, it sounded like there was a bit of a learning curve for getting the stickers to print correctly, so I thought that it might be easier to just print my own pictures on sticker paper that I already had.

I was able to download a template from the Rubik's cube website, which is a Microsoft Word document. I tried bringing the photos that I wanted directly into Word, but it was too frustrating for me to size the pictures the way I wanted to, so I saved the template as a PDF and opened it in Photoshop instead. I chose the six pictures that I wanted, cropped them to about 2.2"x2.2", and laid them across the template. There was enough space to do six more underneath, but since I only needed enough for one cube, I just left it blank.

This is what the template looked like with the pictures in it:

I saved it as a jpeg, and printed it, making sure to choose the "Fit to page" option. I used Avery sticker paper like this:

And then I used my paper cutter to cut the pictures into the individual squares. Each time I cut a square, I laid it out where it would go so that I could keep track of all the little pieces. Then, I individually stuck each little square sticker to the corresponding square on the Rubik's Cube. I actually had an old cube on hand that the original stickers had come off. (Thanks, Justin!) This part did get a little tedious, but the whole project from start to finish didn't take more than an hour. The stickers stuck surprisingly well. I don't think that they will last forever, but I figure maybe in another couple of years I can re-customize it for him with some new pictures.

Of course I didn't get pictures of all of the sides before it was scrambled, but here a couple more scrambled pictures of the other sides:

I think that Jared has had fun trying to solve this. It is a little bit more challenging than a solid color Rubik's cube, so I am excited for him to be able to put it back together. 

-Mandi