Recently I've had a couple of pregnant people in my life... my good friend Susan (you can check out some cute baby pictures over on her blog) and my step-sister Adriane. I wanted to do something special. I would have cross-stitched them a baby blanket, but you may remember it took me nearly two years the last time... Long story short, I still have it in my closet, but at this point I'm thinking that will be (hopefully) my future baby's blanket.
I have been reading through Young House Love from the very beginning. Toward the very end of Susan's pregnancy I read about a customized baby book they made. What I really enjoyed about this book was the predictions page... something so unique and cute... I loved it and stored it away for my future baby. But then I realized, why not do this for other people!
And thus the idea was born!
First I needed to figure out what should go in a baby book. I googled around and found a lot of good page ideas. Then I also went right to the source... pregnant Susan. I played it off that I was making it for Adriane and what she felt should go in the book. I'm not sure if my sly ways really worked, she was probably on to me the entire time, but whatever, it worked!
Then I developed all the pages in PowerPoint. I used this the last time I made a book for my step-mom's birthday. With a bit of computer help from my awesome husband and I was in business. I decided not to do anything with clipart of anything, and just found a cute fun font and got to town. This and the research was the most time consuming step.
The good thing about creating the pages yourself is they are customizable. Like for Susan, she knew she was having a boy, so some pages said It's a Boy or whatever. And for Adriane her parents are divorced so I made three 'grandparents and me' pages instead of just two for Susan. Also for Adriane, they aren't figuring out the sex, so I made her both an 'It's a Boy' and 'It's a Girl' pages.
Once I had it all perfected I printed the pages out on card stock paper.
In the mean time I hit up a craft store (hint here is to go during their sales, like Hobby Lobby they run 50% off sales every few weeks, so just gotta watch the sales.) I went shopping for Susan first... I picked up a cute 'boy' scrapbook and some extra pages. I also picked up a big book of colorful paper. If you look at the YHL book above you'll notice the brightly colored paper, and that was a look I wanted to mimic. Then when I went shopping for Adriane I bought a gender neutral color book and some extra page inserts.
So then I cut out all the printed pages and colored paper. It was a bit challenging picking out the colored paper and figuring out the order without repeating colors or patterns, but I made it work. And it probably goes without saying here that I didn't use any 'girl' colors for Susan and only used 'girl' colors for the couple of girl pages I made just in case Adriane has a girl.
I used those glue, sticky squares to attach the printed pages to the colored paper. Inserted them into all the pages in the book and it was complete! They both turned out SO GOOD in my opinion. I'm actually pretty proud of them to be perfectly honest.
Wanna see pictures?? Of course you do!!
Here's Adriane's gender neutral colored book...
Here's some pages...
Here's what I was meant by the boy/girl pages in Adriane's book... That's my post-it so she knows which pages are special
I'm really happy with this project. So here's my question for my faithful blog readers... Do you think I could sell these types of books? Maybe including the birthday book as well since most of the work is done on that one too? An if you do think they could sell, roughly how much could I sell them for? I've been considering this. I enjoy putting them together so it would be just a little extra cash for me... but was wondering what others thought.
1 comment:
I totally love the baby book you made for me! Its so awesome!! I love how you personalized it. Its one of my favorite presents I received. :)
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