52 Weeks: A Labor of Love

One of the craftiest projects that I have ever done was make a baby... I mean I worked on that sucker for 9 whole months.

When I was pregnant I stumbled upon an idea from Young House Love. They were taking a weekly picture of their daughter for the first year to chart her growth {and because it is so darn cute}. When I saw this idea I thought, "I can totally do that!" "The hubs could totally do that!" I showed him the idea and he was all for it. 


Now, let's take a side bar for just a second and say that we are the King and Queen of starting photo projects and never finishing them, so when this idea was born {pun fully intended}, I never thought that we would actually follow through. However, we are going strong with our daughter being 10 1/2 months {how did she become that old} and we have not missed a week yet {though we have come super close}. I guess becoming parents has made us more responsible!

Here are just a few of our weekly photos! To see more click here.

From day week one everyone that has seen her weekly photos have always asked us 3 questions:
1. Where did you get all the onesies? (Answer: It is just a simple white onesie used over, and over, and over again, with a little photoshop magic worked in)
2. Isn't that a lot of work? (Answer: Yes and No. The hard part is just remembering to do it. Once the picture is taken it can sit in our camera for a bit till we have time to photoshop it.)
3. Where do you get all the blankets? (Answer: We beg, borrow and steal! The people over at Young House Love buy a yard of fabric every week, but their job is their blog and doing DIY stuff. We knew going into this project that we could not afford to buy fabric every week solely for the sake of a picture {and because if I was being honest, I knew I would never do anything with the fabric and I am way too cheap money conscious to do that}. Luckily for us we have lots of blankets with fun patterns, and we had quite a few different fabrics from my sewing collection to start us out. After we did a few weeks our friends and family got excited about the project and started bringing their blankets and fabric over for us to use. However, we could only ride that train for so long and right at the 10 month place we totally ran out of material to put her on. We threw around the idea of just biting the bullet and going to buy some discounted fabric for the last 8 weeks, but James had a brilliant idea: if we are able to photoshop a design onto a white onesie, why can't we photoshop a design onto a white sheet. So we tried it and it worked really well {I am trying to get James to write a tutorial on how he did this for his blog, once he does I will link it up}. I would not recommend doing this for every week, because it would get a little labor intensive, but it works great when you are in a pinch!

Original Photo

Finished product!

Once those three questions are asked, people instantly ask me to teach them how to do it... so that is what I am going to do {and by I, I mean I am going to link you over to YHL's tutorial that they wrote, because they did an amazing job teaching us how to do it, so I figure they can teach you as well!}


Click on the link for a full tutorial of how to do your own 52 week project
Give hey sis a little love: If you click on the link, leave a comment on their blog post letting them you know you found them through us!


The beauty of this project is that it was totally FREE! Ahhh.... how I love free!