I doubled up the photo for month 12 so that I could have one with the original setup and one with my new setup. My criteria for this new setup pretty much revolved around making the whole affair as low-stress as possible. Here is the result:

The fireplace is great because it gets decent light from multiple windows and it’s really easy to frame the shots consistently from month to month. The baby gate blocking the actual interior of the fireplace isn’t exactly the most photogenic, and it may not be there forever, but too bad I refuse to care. I’m not going to worry too much about random other things appearing on the hearth (like the drum this month) other than vaguely attempting to keep the little gold dragon in the shot. I figure Dakota can keep wearing whatever bottoms she has on for the day, and I can just change her into the shirt for the picture.

The shirt itself is a size 4T undershirt (they run pretty small) that I got in a pack of 5. I painted the lettering on, but it was actually made incredibly easy when I learned the trick of ironing freezer paper onto fabric to make a peel-away stencil…

I was able to buy a pack of freezer paper in regular letter-sized sheets, and print out the design on my inkjet printer. Then I used a craft knife to cut out the letters, and then just ironed the paper waxy-side-down onto the shirt. Painting was trivially easy at that point. Finally I can put the years of randomly accumulated fabric paint to use!

I’m thinking I’ll add the words “and 1 month” to the same shirt for next month. and then… I dunno, cross out the 1 month and paint in “2 months”? Or maybe I’ll switch to another shirt from the same pack after that. Maybe I could add a little picture stencil for each month too? Hmmmmm.