Paper Crafts: March 2007 Archives
Thank you to everyone for all of your well wishes for us and for the baby. Even my dad messaged me to say how lovely he thought it was that so many people wanted to send their happy feelings our way. We are very touched. Certainly there will be updates on Miss Z and our preparations for her arrival. In the next couple of days, I will also share the backstory. Since it's not all happy stuff, I didn't want make it a part of our baby's introduction. But it is an important story, at least to me, and I would like to tell it.
It's kind of hard to follow up the baby's introduction with a craft project, but at leat this project does have a baby connection. Over the weekend, Julie and I took a class at the Paper Source in Lincoln Park called "Limited Edition Binding". In it, we created a beautiful book, where we sewed the folios together, picked the cover papers and the book tape. Our teacher was lovely and the whole day went by so quickly while we were learning and putting it all together.
One thing that was very interesting was connecting the paper folios to create the page section. If you've done some needlework before in your life, there were many things that would remind you of embroidery and knitting and crochet. And it was easier than you might think it would be.
I love this top down view of the book because you can see the detail in the spine (I think the teacher called it a free floating spine, because the part of the book that is the pages doesn't actually adhere to the back of the spine). It's this view that really gives me the "wow! I made a real book" feeling.
So what I am I going to do with this book? How does it tie into Baby Z? Well, I've decided that I'm going to use it as a journal for her. It will be the place where we (I'm trying to convince John to do it to, but he's not sure it's his medium) write down important (at least important to us) things about what is going on with her. A place to write about firsts, to save pictures or other little mementos. Something that when she's older she can look through and find out a little more about herself and her parents. It's definitely not going to be as formal as some of those baby journal books that you can buy in the store, but hopefully it will be just as meaningful. I'm just hoping now to find something with an embossed "Z" on it that I can put on the cover.
As a final note, unrelated to books, but still related to the baby, some of you asked if I was going to make her a quilt. In fact, Serenity is going to be her quilt and I am building her nursery around the blues, greens and purples in the quilt. My mother is making some lovely pillows that use some similar fabrics for her nursery and I am thinking of making a few more of those blocks from the Serenity quilt to assemble and use as a crib bumper. So never fear, the baby will definitely have hand-made things from her mom!
