Author: Marina

A mini book for Miss O

 

Exactly one year ago we announced to our families and friends that we were pregnant. It was a magic  nine-month wait, with lots of ups and downs, joy and tears, excitement and fear (a lot of fear!). But it was all truly forgotten by the moment Miss O was born; there was no time to even think about how life was before. And so I’m glad I did have the time to put together a little book documenting how we spent the nine months before, what we did and how we prepared ourself to embrace her to our world from the moment we found out we were expecting. 
The idea of the mini book came reading elise blaha’s blog (the mini books guru!); I put it together using a variety of plain and pattern paper, cut to 4″x6″ and bounded using two 25mm rings. The front cover was made using a letterpress machine (I talked about it here) and the title, well, it speaks for itself…we did think about her for nine months (if not before!).
I managed to squeeze nine months in about 50 sheets, above are a selection of random pages from the book.
It will be our ‘how we were before you were born’ memory and a nice little gift for Miss O when she will be old enough to appreciate it.

Out and about

I’ve started to do things on the move…I had to! With a little one your time is not yours anymore. It took me time to realise it. I was fighting it at first, trying to do things as I used to, trying to fit her needs into mine. Well, after four and half months I finally gave in, and you know what, it got better, much better! I learned how to make the most of my time when baby O is asleep and getting organised so I can do staff easily. I started to take photos with my phone, so I can send them to friends and family or post them online straight away…there is no more time for downloading pics on my laptop, do the editing, creating folders, etc; this is now a monthly task! I put together a very small sketching set, easy to carry around and ready for whenever…if I want to post a sketch I just take a pic of it…no more time for scanning! And now the blogging task. I was hoping to increase the number of posts on the blog, but that didn’t happened either… so now I’m posting on the go using an app on my phone. Fine, the results are not the same, I admit, the app has a lot of limitations (a lot!!), but while waiting for google to make it better, I’d rather post as it allows rather than not posting at all.

2012 plan

Not much of a plan this year! The Moleskine diary arrived early January and it took me almost a month to write a post about this year goals and plans…not a good start I would say. I’m still adjusting to my new family life and oh boy if it’s hard! But I have good intentions to slowly fit my old daily routine into it, at least until I got back to work after the summer. The plan is going to be a mix of DIY projects and things I’ve been meaning to do for a long time. So here it is:



Finish the Striped Baby Blanket

This is an ongoing project which I started back in October 2011 (you can read about it here and here). Half way through the project I realised I had to buy more yarn to make it the size I wanted, so ended up using three 50g balls for each colour. I’m taking notes of how many stripes I’m knitting in each colour and if does turn out well  I’m planning to post a tutorial on Ravelry.
Learn how to use my camera properly
G bought me this camera (Canon Powershot SX120 IS) for my birthday a couple of years ago and still haven’t managed to learn how to use the manual settings! Since I take rubbish photos all the time, I thought it would be nice to have some nice pics of my little one for a change taken with a real camer rather than the camera phone.

Buy few, but good!
This will be my 2012 mission, no more shopping spree to Primark (…not that I’ll have the time to do it anymore) or “I’m buying this because it’s on sale”! After the arrival of a certain someone, I had to make space for all of her things. While tidying up I realise I collected a lot of rubbish during the past years, and not just clothes! so for this year I’m planning to buy only things that I really need and not just because they are on sale or don’t cost much. I’m also planning to buy more quality, handmade things, things that will last and that don’t bore you after a while. LESS IS BEST will be the motto!

Christmas Cards 2011

Due to the circumstances this year (baby due in a week!!!) we had an early Christmas lunch with some of our friends. So yesterday I finally decided to make some cards to go with the gifts. I picked the idea from Tracy Kyle design, just made it more simple I guess. I used some coloured and textured cardstock paper, cut out the shape of a triangular tree and a trunk and sticked them on together on the card. For the text on the side of the tree I used a gold Pilot pen. For the inside of the card (which is not shown unfortunately as I had already written some text on all of the cards!) I simply sticked a stripe of Christmas ribbon to the bottom of the page using double sided tape. To embellish the white and boring envelope I used some gold tape and gold Pilot pen for the text. 
Will have to make some more pretty soon!!!