Hello, 2011

I know, I know. It is March. But February was a blur and I didn’t actually receive this calendar until the last week of January.

I created this calendar as a very late Christmas present for Henry’s parents. I almost had it ready for MLK weekend, but ran into some complications with the size of my calendars.

I have made several postcards using Overnightprints.com in the past. But this was my first venture into their other products.

I have not been the best of documenting Lucy’s every move besides this blog. For her first year, I had a generic baby calendar and I added details for each day. Although there were a few stretches of time when I forgot to add anything, specifically last February. But this year I managed to do a little better.

These are all photos I took throughout her first year, although they are mainly from the fall. Instead of trying to pick a corresponding picture for the month it happened the year before, I selected a picture of an activity in said month. For example, even though this picture was taken in October, it looks like something Lucy might do in March. (At least I hope.)

And maybe a trip to the zoo in April?

I included a caption, date and place on each picture.

Instead of using the calendar option that Overnightprints has created, I uploaded my own calendar using iCal. I was able to include this year’s holidays and our family birthdays and anniversaries.

This was a tad bit tricky because I had to print the twelve months and save them as a pdf. Then I created images using the pdf. But the natural image size is only 200 dpi, so I had to go back in and resize each of the images in Photoshop to 300 dpi. Even if the text is a little small, I felt that it was worth it because I prefer the size and look of the iCal calendar. Plus it is great to have all of your important dates listed.

The remainder of the year….

When I started the project, I wanted to use the last two pages for a spread of thumbnail images of 2010. I became exhausted around May. Plus I realized that I was running out of time. My project had taken the better part of my evenings for a solid week. And I was pressing up against getting them printed in time to send them to Florida. So I decided to create a place to capture Lucy’s favorites in 2011 instead.

For these small pictures, I also included names and dates so that we would remember them later on.

For the back cover, I found 2011 and 2012 calendars online and added lots of family photos.

While searching for pictures, I found that I only had one picture of Alex and Lucy from all of 2010. And I had to pull that one from a video. I am not sure if that counts, but I am happy that I was able to include her uncle on the back!

My goal is to create a new calendar every year as a scrap book for Lucy and any future sibs. We will see how many years I manage! But it is a pretty satisfying project. Let me know if you have any questions about creating your own.