Scrapbooking Arlo’s second year

A while ago I wrote that I had started to make a digital scrapbook of Arlo’s life so far.

At the bottom of this post, you can find the pages I made to document Arlo learning to walk. I am not doing a very good job of keeping on top of this at all, but I’ve been creating a layout every now and then when the mood strikes. Here are some of the pages I’ve made since:

Every book will start with a birthday. This is the bare bones of the front page. I’m not entirely happy with the colour scheme, I think it could look a lot better, so I will play around with that at some point. All pages are saved as PSDs so I can easily edit them if I decide I want to swap out images, change what I’ve written, or any part of the design.

I’m also planning to use the ‘text inside a big number’ idea for monthly milestone updates – maybe I can even fit my ‘Dear Arlo’ letters in there.

A birthday double page spread (or DPS as we always called it at work). His 1st birthday was such a big moment, I wanted to include as many photos as I could. Just as well that I don’t actually have that many photos from his birthday! – I was too busy to take any myself.

A seasonal page. I love these photos because they are some of the only decent shots I have of him crawling (which is funny seeing as he crawled for so bloody long!). I want to give a sense of time and place on most of the pages by including the month or specific date and where the photos were taken, so this will be updated later once I decide on the title card design and font.

He’s making new discoveries all the time, and I thought it was kind of cool that I could document the first ever time he saw a particular animal, like this time with the snail.

And then these two might look familiar because I included them as part of my 366 project.

I’m not sure that I want to dedicate whole pages to these two, but I’m sure they will feature somewhere in the book on a smaller scale.

As I’ve said before, I want this book to be the ultimate record. So, I will also be including exerts from my blog posts in there somewhere. Design-wise, I feel like the layouts are not the best. But I’m happy with it as a first attempt, and I’m hoping my skills will improve by the time I come to making the third and fourth books, and so on.

I estimate that I will be finished making this book sometime in the next ten years.