How to make a baby memory book at home

The simplest structure is the one every parent understands: a spread per month. A 16-page booklet gives a cover, an inside title page, six spreads and a back page, which covers half a year; a 24 or 28 page booklet covers the full first year with room for a birth page and a birthday. Each spread gets one big photo of the month, two or three small ones, a milestone line (weight, length, first tooth, first word) and a sentence about what happened.

Foldpic's baby templates use a photo plus journaling column layout for exactly this, with a date and stats text slot styled to match. Autofill will place your photos in the order they were taken, which for a baby book is usually the order you want.

You will have hundreds of photos a month and you need four. Pick the one that shows the face best as the hero, and then details: hands, feet, the toy of the month, the outfit that only fitted for three weeks. Phone photos at 12 megapixels are more than sharp enough for an A5 page; the ones to avoid are screenshots and pictures forwarded through messaging apps, which have been recompressed and print soft.

Keep faces away from the page edges. Foldpic's templates leave a 10 mm safe area, and the review screen flags any photo that will print soft at its slot size.

A baby book gets chewed, dropped and read a hundred times. Use 120 to 160 gsm double-sided matte paper for the inside pages so they survive, and a 160 to 200 gsm cover if your printer accepts it. Most home printers jam above about 200 gsm. If you want it truly toddler-proof, laminate the cover at a copy shop or slip the finished booklet into a clear sleeve.

Staple with two staples on the spine, then fold the staple legs flat and cover them inside with a strip of washi tape so nothing sharp is exposed.

A stapled booklet cannot grow once it is bound, and beyond about 32 pages a home-stapled spine gets thick and the inner pages creep outward. The answer is a series: a booklet per half-year, or per year, all the same size and style so they sit together on the shelf. In Foldpic, duplicate the finished project, keep the template and change the photos, and the second volume matches the first.

For grandparents, print a second copy of each booklet; the cost is the same handful of sheets. An accordion version of the highlights, single-sided on photo card, makes a good standing gift.

Short and specific beats long. A line of stats and one sentence per month is plenty, and it is what you will re-read later.