Baby's First Baseball Card

It did not take long, but I finally make a baseball card of my son. The real reason I tried my hand at making a custom cut signature was to test my skills at making something more important like this. This particular project started because of a hilarious mistake photograph taken by my wife during a photo shoot.

My wife, on top of being a teacher, is a photographer. She takes some amazing photographs, but they cannot all be winners. Here is an example of one of her awesome photos of our son.

That said, not all of them are keepers. While she was going through her files, I happened to see one of her "nope" pictures and asked her to send it to me. It is a perfect picture for his first baseball card. In it, he appears to be doing a one-armed push-up. He is actually flailing about on the kitchen table, but sometimes it is all about perspective.

The first decision I had to make was easy. What would make a more perfect card for a one-armed push-up than the In Action subset of 1972 Topps.

The hardest part of creating a custom such as this is finding the right font. It took about 30 minutes to find the font for the name and matching the font on the back of the card. I also had a problem that the image was smaller than the window, so I had to clone more table onto the right side of the image.

I won't bore you with the details of gluing and cutting this up, as you can read all about that process in the article about the Dave Eilers cut autograph card. Now, instead of just making these to put away in a box, I decided to throw these in with the birth announcements. Not all of our friends and family would appreciate it, but a few would find it hilarious.

Here is the front of the finished product.

And here is the finished back.

But wait, what is this?!

That's right, there is a rare subset. Ten of the cards are perfect, but four are a super rare "grammar error" variation. At least that is what I am going to call them. In reality, I made a grammar error and didn't notice until I had already glued together four of them. It is better to call them a rare subset than a mistake, right?

I also intentionally made some of them off-center as an homage to the 1972 quality control standards, though I made sure both 1/xx cards were well centered, as these will be in Sawyer's baby book. I will be keeping 2/xx in my collection and I will keep a record of where each of the other cards go. I still have two that I need to find homes for, since my wife doesn't think most of her friends will appreciate my madness.