Sunday, August 9, 2015

Scrapbooking DOA: Baby Announcements That Never Were



Although I meant to present my "family history scrapbooks" to my sisters for Christmas about five years ago (how time flies!) they still don't have them.  I was actually rocking along, mass producing the pages to be the same across eight scrapbooks so they'd be the same.

The plan was a nice cheery overview of just a couple of generations back so everyone would have a feel for where they came from, what their "people" of the the past were like, because none of them remembered anyone.

 I'd do a section on each sister/brother kind of giving a short overview in pictures of their own life.

Way too ambitious any way you look at it, but did that stop me? No. It has slowed me down considerably, but I got this. I am going to produce the coolest albums ever.

My latest project is to make up baby announcements for each kid.  With eight children, you don't get baby showers for everyone, and I suspect they just picked up the phone and called or wrote letters to get the word out that another arrival had made it into the depot.  Mom wouldn't like that last sentence.

Current baby announcements are all slick photos with the baby's pertinent info on them.  Not what I was looking for.  Also, my sisters all looked very much alike as babies so I can't tell who is who.

Enter my love of cutesy "vintage" clipart.  (No there is no vintage vibe in my house, just alot of books, toys and games everywhere).

There was one I copied that I'm sure seemed sweet to another generation, but the whole "baby creeps" idea put me in mind of some horror film.  The font is part of the creepy factor too.




I hoped to find some that had lines for baby info: date of birth, sex, size, etc. that were blank so I could make copies and fill in the information for everyone.  These are rare and not always quite what I want.


I'm looking for sweetie pie stuff.


I'll have to just use the images on cardstock and add text.

There was a bad moment the other day when I was looking at scanners to see if there were any that could do new and interesting things with old pictures and slides and negatives.  I found one, the Epson 550V. 

It not only would work more efficiently than the current one, but it would convert scanned documents into editable text — ABBYY® FineReader® Sprint Plus OCR.

Does this mean I can scan my cute babies in and add text to them? (Potentially, but I'm wondering if they mean a text document that could then be edited, rather than offering to put text on any scanned item.)

Edit 8/9/15:

Microsoft Publisher has templates for greeting cards, and a few (perhaps 5) templates for "New Baby"  that are bland but customizeable:



Perhaps with tweaking.  I didn't realize you could create your own palette of colors if you don't care for what they offer.

2 comments:

  1. I think it must have been at least 12 years ago that I promised to mail some things I'd found to 2 of my cousins. I still intend to do it! I don't ever try to blog more than once a week, and I'm not even hitting that! You're doing fine.

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    Replies
    1. You're an Author, and don't need to blog at all, so once a week is a generous extra for your readers.
      I started this as an exercise in learning Web 2.0, and I've continued it over time because it is a pleasant conversation for me with my imaginary readers.
      Over time, as our library system allowed us fewer and fewer opportunities to be creative, I found it nice to have a place to create book lists and share information in my own, approved by nobody in advance way.
      I bet your cousins would love that information you were going to send!

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