Thursday, January 23, 2014

Custom Baby Journal


Hello Blog :]] I've been missing you a lot lately, but life has been SUCH a whirlwind. We sold our house [in four days!], moved across town three days before Christmas, and had a baby in there somewhere. CRAZY.

But now that we're starting to get settled,  I've been working on tons of new art and journal stuff, and I can't wait to start sharing it with you. Trying to figure out how to squeeze it all in around a newborn's "schedule" [haha, as if. I'm blogging from my phone right now.]

The one thing I HAVE kept up with over the last few months has been Baby's Journal. I knew I didn't want to do a traditional "baby book" to keep up with the first year of her life, so I created a custom journal. I used the cover of an old music book, and bound pages of mixed media paper, scrapbook paper and other bits and pieces. This was my first time binding a whole hard-cover book, too!





It's part baby book [stats on her birth, her birth story, notes from her baby shower] and part journal from me to her [thoughts about being pregnant, how we picked her name, personal mushy stuff about being her mama] Most pages are very personal and I won't share them here, but some are fun, like this calendar that had everyone's guesses about when she would arrive [notice that I had to go back to the page and add an extra WEEK because holy cow, she took her time ...]





I had been holding onto that "Spirit of Adventure" balloon [from the movie Up!] for over a year and a half, waiting for the perfect journal spot for it.



Hospital bracelets, foot prints and birth stats [her birth story is on the following page]. Design-wise, this page is not my favorite, but I feel like it represents the weird fog of those first few baby weeks. I knew I wanted to get it all down before I forgot, and before those snippets got lost in the move, but I put next to NO thought into how to do it beautifully. Getting it down was more important than getting it down perfectly.



I have about a thousand photos to print and add to pages [I left a giant space on this page, which is made from the cute wrapping paper my mom used to wrap Baby's first Christmas ornament]




Some of my favorite pages are behind this divider. You will definitely be seeing more of those pages soon; in fact, once this baby book is full, I'll probably continue a new journal just for those Rules.