Fall Photo Shoot

This weekend we took advantage of the gorgeous Chicago weather and had a play day in Oz Park.

Since our big girl is now six months old, I thought I'd document the milestone with a mini photo shoot. Claire was a trooper and stayed out in the fresh air for over 3 hours, doing nothing more than relaxing and posing for mommy of course.

Big News! She can sit up on her own now, too :-)


We also met up with our friends, so I snapped a few cute ones of them as well:

Claire was officially tuckered out:

First Family Photo Shoot

Just after Claire turned 3 months old we had our first family photos taken by Pamela Quigley while we were visiting family and friends in St. Louis. We met early in the morning at Bee Tree Park on a hot day, heavy with humidity, but Pamela's photos look so light and airy that you would never know it.

I felt like we were totally on the same page in terms of styling the shoot, and style in general. I bought this fun picnic blanket from Land of Nod for our picnic theme and we also brought some special touches, like my late grandmother's picnic basket and the vintage letterpress blocks I bought for Claire just after she was born.

Check out all of the photos here, but I have posted some of my favorites in this post.

We are so happy with our photos and if you are in the St. Louis area, I highly recommend Pamela for any of your future photo shoots.

The Claire Project

If we are friends on Facebook, if you follow me on flickr, or you ever click on the top bar of my blog, you might be familiar with our weekly photos of Claire.

Now, I can't take credit for this fabulous fabric idea, which I borrowed from Young House Love's Clara Project (right down to a similar name for our baby girl!), but I will take the credit for wrangling our wiggly baby weekly and getting some ok shots along the way.

Each week (Thursday mornings for the first 14 weeks and now Saturday mornings since I have been back to work), I dress Claire in a short-sleeve white onesie, lay some fabric out and get to work. I try to do this in the morning so that the sun is coming through our windows just right. For a while, I laid the fabric on the couch cushion, but now that she is bigger I lay it on the floor over our area rug. Also, I highly recommend doing this after a feeding. In my experience, full belly = happy baby.

Most weeks I use one yard of fabric, usually bought on-sale from JoAnn, but sometimes I throw in a pretty printed sheet, baby blanket or other type of fabric object I find around the house. Basically, if you are handy with a camera and with Photoshop, you can achieve the same thing by following this handy YHL tutorial.

So here are the results this far:

And here are close-ups of a few milestone weeks along the way...

Week One:


Week Six:


Week Twelve:


And today, Week Seventeen:

It's really fun to click back and forth through the photos so far to see how much Claire has changed, especially from the first to the last.

At the year's end, I plan to do a few things.

1. Make a blurb book documenting Claire's first year.

2. Print all 52 images and display them at her 1st birthday party. Maybe like this:

3. Also, I plan to either learn to sew, or commission my sewing sisters, to create a few things out of the fabric, such as this pillow I found on pinterest:

Or maybe even a quilt, like Sherry made from YHL:

35 weeks to go! Only time will tell how our Claire Project project ends up for us.

Exploring Chicago - Devon Avenue

I know I left you hanging after Andersonville, so without further ado I will present to you our second stop in the Exploring Chicago Photography Course...

Devon Avenue:

Devon Avenue was originally known as Church Road, but it was renamed in the 1880s by Edgewater developer John Lewis Cochran after Devon station on the Main Line north of Philadelphia. The street has been settled by many immigrant groups, which is perhaps most evident between Kedzie and Ridge Avenues in West Ridge, Chicago. Here, one traveling eastward will encounter, in succession, an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, a Russian American neighborhood, an Indian American neighborhood, a Pakistani American neighborhood, and a Bangladeshi American neighborhood. Portions of Devon in this area have been renamed in honor of Golda Meir, Mahatma Gandhi, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

The main area we walked, was the "Little India" portion of Devon Avenue. Here are the photos from my afternoon there. First we have the food...















And then we have the fashion and decor...









And next, a little Indian-American pop culture...





And last but not least, we had lunch for the day at Tiffin, which was delicious:

Overall, this was an area not very far from my home in terms of miles, but it seemed like a world away. There were times on Devon that I saw such unfamiliar things that I forgot I was in Chicago, or even America. This is one of the many reasons that I love this course, and love Chicago as a whole. It's a big city made up of many tiny neighborhoods, each with their unique cultures and identities.

In this post we got a taste of South Asian culture in Chicago, and in my next post I'll take you to the Eastern European areas as we explore the neighborhood of Ukranian Village.