Making your Own Christmas Card

Every year, I would spend hundreds on family photos because I figured I'd get great pictures. After a few disappointments, I decided a couple of years ago I would start taking my own family portraits.  If they didn't turn out, I could always go find yet another photographer.  The last two years have been interesting using a tripod, timer and running back and forth, but we were able to actually get a lot of great pics, some of my all time favorites.

This year, I solicited my sister to snap the pictures for me since it is a lot easier than arranging everyone and trying to snap the pictures while being in it as well.  I generally scope out a location that I love, but this time, we winged it.  My husband suggested a local park I'd never been to and to my amazement, it had a secluded path that was completely private.

We had 1 hour of overcast (according to the internet) so we had to work quickly.  I decided this year, I wanted to have fun Christmas cards so I made A. wrap lights around us because he is the mischievous one in the family. I am so happy with the results. 

Then, I went home and added text using photoshop and voila I have my Christmas card.  I love it!

Valentine's Day Cards

Are you ready for Valentine's Day? I was ready before Christmas. There were so many companies offering free greeting cards, that I thought I would make some Valentine cards and see how they turn out.

Last year, I made these Valentine Cards

This year, I found this really cute print and decided I would replicate it.

I went photo shopping away, drawing my circles. I also included my kids' names at the bottom. I'll add some kind of "orange" candy in the envelope and call it day.

Here's a great deal to get you into the Valentine spirit. Tiny Prints is offering a FREE Personalized Valentine's card through 1/25 and you get free shipping. Just use the code TPGFREE17A and select "send to me" for FREE shipping, or you can pay $.45 and have it shipped directly to the recipient. Get creating because the offer expires tomorrow.

Photo Cards or Tags

Each year, I like to make photo tags to attach to my kids' teachers gifts they hand out for Christmas. It adds a personal touch that everyone loves to see. I've been doing these tags for four years now and teachers love them. Here is E.'s Christmas tag to his teachers this year.

A. was so tiny a few years ago when I created this tag in 2008.

Now for the instructions: It all starts out with a fabulous kid-bribed photo shoot. This year it was as simple as pie or M&M's I should say. For my kids, if you get one kid to do something, you will get the rest to do the same because they always want to follow suit.

E. was the first to get in front of the camera. No bribery necessary. Just a hug from Mom was all he needed to cooperate.

Ryan wanted to copy E. so also no bribery was needed for his smiles behind the lens.

A. didn't need to be bribed for the first 5 shots, but after that, I had to fork up an M&M for each additional shot. That is, if I wanted a smile, that was the payment that was needed.

Good thing we only needed sibling shots.

Total price tag for my portraits, 5 M&M's for each kid. Despite the fact that E. and R. didn't ask for any, I felt compelled to compensate them for their time.

When the little ones were done, J. got behind the lens. At 13, this took a matter of minutes to get a great shot.

Voila! Total time when everyone is cooperating, 25 minutes, about 5 minutes per kid and another 5 minutes for the group shot.

After rummaging through the hundreds of shots, you need a template. I go here for my templates. These are photo greeting card templates that I have used as Christmas tags. Basically, you download the template, import your image, type in your text, and then you have yourself a wonderful card or tag you can hand out. For the tags that I have used, you need to download the additional templates they provide here. Download them to your computer, then once you open up the software, import the file you downloaded.

Go to your local photo place to get them developed and attach them to your gift and you are done.

I love the personal touch it adds to the gift. Can't wait to watch my kids hand them out!