baby, meet your family:

I have had this project on our kitchen table for six weeks now. And yesterday, I decided to finish this bad boy. The idea is from Ali Edwards, taking an old type case and turning it into a picture frame. I found this type case a full year ago at a garage sale, and my sweet husband even hung it on the wall then. But no pictures filled it up until today.

When I first purchased it, I wanted to fill it with my personal cloud of witnesses...all of the people who have who shaped me in significant ways. I thought it would be cool to fill it with old, old pictures of my grandparents, church friends and family, just to always have a tangible place to find my favorite supporters.

But when we got pregnant, I knew immediately that I wanted to fill this things with our baby's cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents and great grandparents (and me and Rory!). I think we'll probably hang it over the changing table (up high...I've been warned that is a very dangerous place to hang anything if our baby is a boy...)

I started this project a month and a half ago, first by using a pliers to pull out almost half of the dividing sections. I had to do this, because I wanted bigger pictures, and my type case was divided into lots of tiny rectangles.

Then I used photoshop to resize all of my pictures to fit specific squares on my type case. I measured with a ruler, resized each picture and then tried to keep track of which picture was to go where.

It helped, but in the end, my measuring skills must be off, because each picture was just a tinsy bit too big, and needed recropping all around.

At one point, the pictures were gentle resting above their designated places, but I didn't have time to crop the whole thing before we went to California, so I layed a towel over it for when I could get back to this project. While we were in California, Toonces, our big boned cat found the towel to be a great place to sleep all day.

When I came back, each picture had been forced down by his paws, and I had to use a tweezer to individually pry each one back up before recropping, using double sided tape and sticking them back down. Annoying, double the work, but worth it. I love it.

If you ever do a project similar to this one, I'd recommend using matte finish photos. Mine are glossy, and it means that the whole display is a bit shiny. But that's minor, I suppose.

Mostly, it's just a super fun way to showcase all of my all-time favorite pictures of the families this baby is joining.