Ennis’ homemade birth announcement booklet

I started thinking about Ennis’ birth announcement far too in advance. Making cute publications is part of my professional obligation, so when I had this great excuse to overdo it on something personal, I took it. This was the result:

Yep, that’s Ennis’ birth announcement. Designed by moi, moi-meme, et je.  I printed out at home. Cut at home. Saddle-stitch stapled at home. Folded at home. And stuffed into envelopes and mailed from my home mostly all by my own effort between the endless early nursing sessions.

Clearly I am insane. Yes, I admit this, but I will say designing the birth announcement booklet at the end of my pregnancy helped me to relax and not fixate on how not perfectly clean my house was and when Ennis was going to arrive.

I designed a good 90% of the booklet before he was born using infant photos of D and myself to test pages so that when he was born, I just replaced our photos with his and made adjustments accordingly. Things weren’t quite the 1:1 swap I had hoped, but still it was doable with a newborn.

I believe I got them in the mail by the time he was four weeks old. For the people I still owed thank you cards, I just slipped the announcement in with them. For those who I had already thanked, they got an extra piece of mail.

If I were doing it again, I’d make the hand and foot prints to scale, and I’d have extra toner on hand because running out and having to wait for it to come in after I started was not a lot of fun.

At this point I can’t remember how many of these booklets I put together, but it was somewhere around 115 which made me feel lucky that I had that many people to thank for gifts, hand-me-downs, and support. In those early weeks of parenthood, it’s good to be reminded that so many people cared about my little family.

Now looking back, I don’t regret the time or money spent on this project at all. It’s a great keepsake even if I didn’t cut all the pages perfectly even. Since I have created an animated gif and uploaded it, it will be archived forever in the bowels of the Internet. I’d say that beats a grainy photo and a cutline in a newspaper.

Booklet details:

- designed in Adobe InDesign

- printed on letter pages cut in half

- finished size was 4.25 by 5.5 inches

- had a border since my printer isn’t full bleed

- cost a pack of cardstock, a toner replacement, a cheap saddle-stitch stapler, and envelopes

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Ennis’ homemade birth announcement booklet