{two part harmony}

Do you remember my idea for a handmade book telling the story of how Justin and I met? Well, good old Justin dutifully did his homework and filled out all of his pages, as did I, and so I set about harmonising those two very different sets of answers to the same questions.

I'm not a hoarder of (too) many things, but we do have a sizable stack of old number plates, which I thought would lend themselves perfectly to making covers for our little book. We met in Arizona, hence the front cover. It was the number plate to my first car -- 765, Yeh! And the back cover is a Texas plate, to show where we are now.

So, onto the stories. I laid the book out so that Justin's version and my version of each story faced each other, for easy comparison of details. Not surprisingly, each of my pages is full of text. Justin is much more minimal, but also much more exact. While I waffle on about what constitutes a "first date", Justin gives an address for the cinema we went to...

...and isn't afraid to restate the important facts (i.e. that his team won at Human Battleship!)



With the text pages facing each other, the backsides of each page were blank. So I added a few photos that seemed significant. Yes, I know, I was born to be a Texan...

Some of our answers were pretty similar, with only small differences in dates and details. However, it turned out that our stories of our wedding couldn't have been more different. While I described our beautiful wedding by the Great Wall, surrounded by friends and family, Justin gave his account of our legal ceremony, back in Tucson. Check out his memories. Seriously, a born romantic.

(The very top question is "when was the wedding?", in case you're wondering!)

But it's wonderful to have memories of both days written down. And, can you believe, I never noticed that our judge only had one arm. I was too focused on being in love. Or maybe too worried about getting mugged?

Each page is simply laid out in Pages (with text-box 4" wide and justified to one side), printed out onto medium-weight cardstock, trimmed to 5.5" wide, and then punched with two holes. The book is bound together with circular binder rings, which can be found at craft shops. This will allow us to add in more pages as we want, and to continue our story. 

I'm already looking forward to reading Justin's account of Tilly's birth, and I've got this photo to stick in somwhere:

We took it at Dave and Busters years ago. It's supposed to predict what our baby would look like. Granted, it's a boy, but not even close to how Tilly turned out. Shows what arcades know about genetics.

I hope you enjoyed a little glimpse of our seven-or-so years together, both from my point of view, and from my dear funny Justin's perspective. I'm sure we'll enjoy reading back over these over the years!

{tilly tuesdays: volume one}

Every Tuesday for forty-eight weeks, each week since she was born, I've been taking a portrait of Tilly.

And creating a little handmade book for this year of Tuesdays couldn't have been easier. (So easy, I couldn't possibly bore you with photos of the process -- i.e. blank paper. Instead, you get a peek at Tilly's book of Tuesdays!)

Materials: 13 sheets of white cardstock, a sheet of patterned scrapbook paper, 52 photographs, a glue stick (or however you like to stick in photographs), a hole punch, string and a black pen.

Isn't it the best feeling when you already own all the supplies?

Each sheet of cardstock was simply folded in half, and then punched with the hole punch about 3" from each edge.

The pages were numbered by week, the photos were glued in on the centre of each page (and cropped slightly if they happened to be landscape).

The finished pages were stacked together and placed on top of the sheet of scrapbook paper. I drew around the pages, creating a cover which was about 1/4" wider than the card on every side, and then cut out the cover. Using the holes in the card as a guide, I marked where to make holes in the cover, and then punched them both.

String was threaded through the holes, starting outside the cover and going through to the middle, then up to the top hole and through back to the outside. I put the string through twice, and tied a knot so that it sat in the middle of the book. (But outside, on the spine, would work, too)

At the bottom of some pages, I marked special things that happened that day. For example, on week thirty-six, Tilly tried her first IKEA meatball. A major milestone in our family.

It's been a great way to see how she's changed over the year, and a wonderful way to display those "everyday" photos -- the ones that aren't always astounding quality (ahem, iPhone effects), aren't always of special events, aren't particularly memorable moments, but sum up daily life at that age.

The one thing that many of the photos have in common is Tilly's expression -- an expression I now recognise as a concentrated, determined effort to get her hands on the camera!

Yes, I'll need to work on getting a few more smiles in the future!

Today, Tuesday, is forty-eight weeks. What a shock it was to see a mere four blank pages left in this year!