Our creative friend Hildi saw earlier posts (here and here) about Polaroid photos and projects, and shared this Polaroid album that she made herself:

When our son was born, a friend gave us a Polaroid camera as a baby present. It inspired us to do this project. We took a picture of our baby every month of his first year.

As we all know, a baby changes a lot in one year. There is something about the immediacy of a Polaroid print that makes this project more poignant. At the end of the year, we had a monthly record of our baby's first year.

I put together this homemade album for the pictures. I chose the accordion structure because it can be viewed both as a book or all at once in a panoramic display, which works great for this time lapse narrative.

I made the accordion myself, it is really simple:

1. Cut a long length of cover weight paper (I used Arches Black Cover) and fold it onto itself, alternating directions.

2. An easy way to get the folds equal and even is to use a piece of chip board as a template to score against. To score, mark the fold with a bonefolder or butter knife.)

3. The covers are white matboard attached to the first and last panel with a dry adhesive. (ATG tape or Gudy-O would work.)

4. I “titled” the mats with an inked wooden type “1.” (A rubber stamp would work well.)

5. I mounted the pictures to both sides of the accordion, this means both the back and front are covers; the dot at the bottom shows which side to start on. (The back cover has a "1" with two dots at the bottom to indicate the second half of the year.)

6. If you are disciplined and follow the one-picture-a-month format, you will need six panels, mounting twelve pictures to both sides of the accordion. I couldn’t resist adding extra cute pictures, so mine is a bit longer.

7. To mount the pictures, I used clear archival Kolo photo corners. I like that Kolo products are archival.

You can see on the desk that I also use a Kolo Havana photo box (for organizing photos) and a Kolo Cortina photo album (as a brag book).

Hildi has shared some other projects on Koloist; one is a great tip about nostalgia hoarding and the other a toddler's big photo album handmade by her parents almost 50 years ago. (Cool to see her parents' creativity rubbed off on her.)

Steve, this is yet another great project idea for your new PoGo that your wife is hopefully going to give you (hint hint). The new ZINK self-stick Polaroids should work beautifully for something like this.