Birth Announcement

I made this birth announcement for my brother's Christmas, to commemorate his daughter's birth in November.

I was inspired by these birth announcements on Etsy. Which were done using a printing method and the art of typography. I found printing from my computer quite limiting, so decided to combine typography with collage to give it a more individual look.

I got the variety of patterned papers ( and some of the fancy lettering) in a scrapbooking kit, which I bought from Paperlace in Dalkeith and used Word to type then print the names. I spent a long time trying out different fonts, colours and sizes and arranging them on the page to get the best layout. All of the paper was hand cut using a craft knife, a metal ruler and a cutting board.

I wanted a little motif of some sort, one which would match Rachel's bedroom decor, so I found out the name of the website which Derek and Nicola bought their wall stickers from and sourced miniature pictures of two of the images in the set, a rainbow and a tree with a little bird sitting on the top.

One of the trickiest things about making this was subtly trying to find out Rachel's exact time of arrival so long after her birth, without Derek or Nicola realising something was afoot!

Display Frame

This is a frame to display some of Isabel's art work in. The frame is a cheap, black, plastic one from IKEA, which I didn't like very much so I decided to decorate it. I got Isabel to help with gluing on the animal pictures, which I cut out of wrapping paper, and I glued on the letterings which spell out GLUE, PAINT, DRAW, WRITE. These were just typed in different fonts on a Word document and then printed out. The whole frame was then covered in a layer of glue afterwards to seal it.

I'm not that impressed with the final result, as I still don't like the black background of the frame and the glue looks a bit messy in places, but I'm pleased to have somewhere to put Isabel's drawings and paintings for now and she really enjoyed helping Mummy to make the frame too. It also gave us somewhere to put the much-cherished drawing that big cousin Anna sent to her last week.