Baby Footprint Keepsake

Baby Footprint Keepsake

Your newborn baby won’t stay little for long… so you are going to want to capture those adorable little footprints and handprints and make them into a keepsake!

 

 

Little newborn baby hands and  feet are so cute.  Funny how, as we get older, feet aren’t so cute anymore…  Anyways, I know that bringing each of the boys home from the hospital, I would just look at that little, tiny life in amazement and marvel at how each little finger and toe were just perfectly formed.  I think any new mother can relate to that feeling of wanting to keep your baby that little forever… although, I will admit that the middle-of-the-night feedings do get a bit old after a while.

Sooooo, since your baby won’t stay little for long, you have to capture those little footprints (and handprints!) while you can.

Here is an easy way to capture you little one’s footprints! In these pictures, I used my youngest son’s little feet to make the butterfly and my two older children made the thumbprint ladybugs and the fingerprint flowers.  This was a great way for all of my children to be included in the picture.  So you can definitely get creative to add more than one child without taking a full handprint or footprint, especially when some of your kids are older and a full hand or foot would take up too much space.  A calligraphy pen is great to add the accents. Use any colors you like and then frame it!

*Tip: When working with newborns, you will probably have better luck with footprints because tiny babies tend to want to close their hand, so getting a clear handprint is quite a bit harder than a footprint.

 

 

This is also a very inexpensive way to make a keepsake of your precious little one. I used a frame that I already had and cardstock. I did have to buy the washable ink pads (make sure it is washable and safe to use on children) and calligraphy pen (less than $10– and you will have these items to use for other crafty projects), but still spent much less than the keepsake plates (shown below) which were done at a studio, and cost at least $25 each.

However, it was my babies’ footprints… and I really wanted to have these keepsakes for display, so I allowed myself to splurge on these for each of the boys.

 

My husband loves to golf. This is a gift that I made for him when our son was about 18 months old. A great way to give a meaningful keepsake to any dad or grandpa. This was painted on a ceraminc plate, coated, and fired at a local paint-your-own pottery studio.

I would have never come up with the idea for this on my own, but attended a workshop where they walked us through how to do the footprint as a golf green and how to complete the scene.  So after I did this one, I wanted to make plates for the other kids, but not the exact same thing.  So I got creative and below you can see my designs:

 

This is one of my favorite footprint pieces that I have done. The design came out good, even though I could have used a few more coats of paint to even it out! My son was 3 years old when I did this, so I needed a little bit longer plate to make it work. After placing his footprint on first, I drew the football outline with pencil (pencil marks disappear during the firing process) and filled in.  Drew in the field hash marks and done!

 

I figured to round out the trio of sports plates, I would do baseball next.  The green came out a bit darker than I had hoped, but my little guy’s footprint stands out, and that is most important!