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Adoption Photo Album

This is a labor of love. My wife and I are in the infant adoption program with Children’s Home Society of Florida. Part of our homework was to create a photo album to be presented to potential birth parents as a way of getting to know us and deciding if we’re who they want to adopt their child. My wife was very patient with me as I took this task to heart and used as many of my skills as I could to create what I felt captured our lives.

After gathering the photos, drawing babies and my wife writing copy, it all came together in InDesign. The pages were printed out on 13” x 19” Epson semi-gloss photo quality paper. Had to order more as it’s kind of a rarity. I set it up so the top of the page would be one side of a page in the book and the bottom would be the other.

I scored the middle, sprayed the front with a spray fixative and then sprayed the back with Super 77. Super 77 will glue anything to anything and it will get on your fingers so be careful. Because the pages were scored, the folding was easy. Trimming was easy after I remembered to mark the crop lines above and below the score.

The Cropodile, while being bright pink and named Cropodile, was very handy. The top and bottom punch different sized holes while the middle smooshes the grommet. Binding was an adventure and we settled on tying each grommet individually with ribbon. The cover photo shows one of our less-successful binding experiments.

The covers were two pieces of stiff cardboard glued together and wrapped in a nice fabric we found. A pattern and logo of sorts was done for the inside front and back covers.

Our hope is that the birth parents will see this and really get a sense of who we are; from the photos and words, the drawings and the deliberate craft it took to put it all together. I’m sure we share that with all adoptive parents who’ve done this.

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