OSCAR'S BABY BOOK

Here's something I've been working on on and off for over a year and half now: Oscar's baby book. If you're not familiar with the concept, a baby book is a memory book filled with journal prompt type pages where you can record your child's first year (or first few years). The way this book is set up is that it's about 90% from the first year, and then a couple pages to fill in between the ages 1-6, so this is obviously still a work in progress, but as I'm done with most of it I thought I'd share a couple of pages from it.

I actually spent a long time looking for the "right" book, because there were so many out there that I was pretty disappointed by. I eventually ended up with this one, and while there's definitely nicer looking books out there, I felt a lot of them really lacked in substance compared to this one. And either way, I planned to make my own cover for it and fill the pages with as many photos as I could, so the design wasn't really that important to me.

One of the things I really like about this project is that I've used so many photos from my phone, which I normally don't do when I make albums. Quite often I tend to only use SLR photos as they tend to turn out nicer, but I just had too many photos of my phone that weren't necessarily of the best quality but still too good not to include. Like the one of his first smile (above photo, bottom right), or the photo of that time he had a giant blow out and pooped all over his chair (above photo, middle), or the one where he's lying in his crib with the cheekiest smile, and he's thrown all of his dummies on the floor (below, middle). You can't always have your SLR ready to capture moments like that!

As for the cover, I made a simple slip cover in navy cotton embroidered with white embroidery floss. I basically expanded on this project I made for a friend years ago, and embroidered his name and birth date along with the constellation of his zodiac sign, and I love how it turned out, as I basically just eyeballed it. I also added this little detail on the back of the book:

Another cool detail is that I added a QR code to one of the first pages. It's not the prettiest, but it links up with a video Graeme and I made of one second long clips from every day of his first year. Graeme got the idea while I was working on my other 1SE project, and I think it's one of my favorite projects ever! It's a bit long, but I love it so much and it melts my heart every time I watch it. I can't believe how much he grew in that first year!

And if you follow me on Instagram, you might have seen the monthly portraits I've been taking of Oscar with one of his teddies. I decided to put them all in order and cover a page with them.

I'll be the first to admit that these books can be kinda cheesy, but I also love stuff like this and I love flipping through my own baby book that my mother made for me. Can't wait to look through it with Oscar when he's older, and I hope he loves it as much as I do!