How to Start Making a Baby Scrapbook

The blessed event. That long and painful journey that ends with unspeakable joy. The birth of a baby.

Babies are the authors of much change in our lives. Sleeping patterns are re-arranged, the sports car is traded in for the mini van, and people who never took a snapshot in their lives are suddenly in the throws of scrapbook fever.

And, along with the baby, the baby scrapbook is born.

However, there is a problem. Just as new parents lack much of the real world experience required to be parents, new baby scrapbookers are novices as well. And while there are many books and articles available for parenting, the baby scrapbooker is left out in the cold. We will try to bridge that gap with this article.

Step 1: Get a good camera before the baby is born.

While there are a lot of people who swear by the old school film cameras, your best bet is to go digital, for several reasons. First, it's cheaper. You will want to take lots and lots of pictures, and while only a fraction may appear in your scrapbook, you will be glad that you had a lot to choose from. Digital photos can also be easily re-worked before before being included in your project. Inexpensive and even free software is available that will assist with cropping the photos, enlarging or shrinking the image to fit, and correcting for problems like poor lighting and the red eye affect from the flash.

Digital also has the advantage of being automatically compatible with electronic formatting software used to layout and print entire scrapbook pages. Digital photos can be imported into the layout and will be printed onto the actual scrapbook page itself. This avoids the 'layered' effect that you get when you past photos or photo quality prints to the page.

Step 2: Start taking pictures.

So, now that you have the camera, what do you take pictures of? Everything. You have a digital camera, take pictures of everything that you can think of. You may annoy people at the time and incur their lack of smiles and scorn, but it will be worth it when you go to make your baby scrapbook and find just the right picture.
Then who will be laughing.

Step 3: Get your technology upgrade.

At this point, we need to talk about image storage. Digital pictures may not require film, but they do require storage space. The higher the resolution of the original photo, the more room you need for the image file.

Storage options include:

Get a bigger hard disc for your computer. This will allow you to store more stuff. Get an external hard disc. These devices are plugged into any USB port on your PC and will immediately be available as an external storage device. Once you have stored the images, the disc can be removed and stored in a safe place. This has the advantage of being able to protect the images should your main PC crash. Solid state USB drives are also an option. These are small, inexpensive and reliable and can store multiple gigabytes of information. CD Rom and DVD discs can also be used to burn copies of your images, but you should be aware that CD Rom discs have a history of fading with time, and should only be used as a short term solution.

Step 4: Start planning the baby scrapbook.

Now that the baby is sleeping through the night, and you have time between feedings to consider the baby scrapbook, how do you proceed from here.

First, consider and underlying theme. Don't just cram the thing full of every picture that you can imagine. If you used a digital camera, you can create PC based and online albums for that.

Most baby scrapbooks are chronological, starting with the first ultrasound pictures and continuing through the pregnancy, the delivery, the nursery, the trip home, and on through he next few weeks of infancy. This is a hard format to beat. But that doesn't mean that you can't liven things up a little.

Include sections on the rest of the family. The work on the baby's room. Furniture shopping. Trying to figure out the first car seat.

In addition to the 'and here is Jenny when she was 3 weeks old' shots, consider sections with specific sub themes.

For example: A sleeping section. One or two pages devoted to pictures of the baby sleeping. Not very exciting, but there are few things more cute than babies sleeping.

How about adventures in eating? As the baby begins to work with real food (or a strained and mashed thereof), include a montage of the more spectacular successes and failures in this key developmental process.

Some babies seem to have an inborn fashion sense and presence. A section on the cutest outfits is always good.

Step 5: Make it happen.

Now it when you begin putting all of those great ideas literally down on paper. You will need to choose the cover style, page color and texture, and other accessories that you will include in your baby scrapbook.

The layout of the scrapbook is as important as the pictures themselves. Choose papers and colors that enhance the theme and content. Accessories for baby scrapbooks are easy to find. Toy themes, boys and girls backgrounds, lace and other textures can add a lot of flare to your effort.

Spend some time planning, be willing to edit and be flexible with the format and you to can produce a baby scrapbook that people will really want to see.