Baby Footprint Art

Wow it is hard to believe that this is my last post of 2015!  It has been a hard year in many ways especially with the loss of both of my grandfathers and my husband's best friend but the shining light of it all has been my pregnancy with my daughter and her birth this past July.  I am looking forward to a great 2016 with our newly expanded family!

Today's post is about the gifts I gave Lyla's grandparents and father for Christmas.  I knew I wanted to give them framed prints from Lyla's newborn photo shoot but I also wanted to throw in a personal touch with Lyla's footprints.  I didn't take any photos of the acquisition of the footprints because I had my hands full enough trying to prevent paint from getting everywhere.  I put some newspaper under her Bumbo seat and then stripped her down to her diaper and changed her into a disposable.  She sat in the Bumbo while I painted her feet with tempera paint and got the prints on paper.  I tried handprints too but since she is in the phase where she wants to grab EVERYTHING it was pretty much impossible to get a good one so I quickly gave up.  It would have been a real struggle to get as many prints as I needed for each gift so I decided to just get one good set and scan them into the computer.

Then I was able to open the prints in Pixelmator and remove the background by using the magic wand tool (the process is the same if you have Adobe Photoshop).  I then saved the image as a Portable Network Graphic (png file format).  Now I had a set of footprints that I can use over and over again.  I can even put them in her digital baby book as stickers (I'll tell you more about that in the future).

Next I opened up the Silhouette design software and imported the footprints.  I made sure to resize the prints to original size.

I was then able to rotate them and make them into a "V" for the word "love."  I made a box roughly the size of a 5" by 7" photo and then used a font called South Rose to spell the rest of the word. I used the shape fill and line color windows to get the letters the way I wanted them to look.

I had selected a mix of landscape and portrait oriented photos from her newborn photos for the gifts so I had to make art in both orientations as well.  Finally I opened the registration marks window and added registration marks so that I could use the print and cut feature.

I found these two-photo frames at Michaels.  I love how these simple and meaningful gifts turned out! Hopefully these will give you some inspiration to make your own footprint or handprint art. You may have noticed that I put her footprints inside a heart on the above photo so that is another idea for you.  I will be back in 2016 (wow that seems weird to say) with the next post in the Sewing for Baby series on making baby skirts!