Documenting Two

I love the idea of taking time each year to document likes along with ages on photos. This is my latest creation with a picture taken at my son's second birthday party at the farm.

How I Did it:
First I uploaded the original to Pixlr-o-matic (PS Love that site! Plus it's an iphone ap as well.)

For this picture I used "Hagrid" color filter, the "Metal" effect and "Flowery" for the border and then saved it to my computer.

Then I opened the picture in Photoshop. I added the text in the French Script MT font in white and added a drop shadow layer effect. I also made painted in a grey cloud behind the text of his likes and set it to 50% opacity. This helps the text stand out from the background a bit more.

Not too hard at all. Pixlr-o-matic really did most of the work and I just had to add some text.

Wouldn't it be fun to have a whole book of these collected from his first 10 years or so? Or even up through graduation?

Fathers' Day

We had a great Father's Day weekend last weekend. On Saturday, my husband and I took our son hiking at Silver Falls just south of Salem and on Sunday we met my dad, stepmom and cousin for breakfast and went fishing. My dad caught a 5 pound steelhead in a new lake we'd never been to before (for those of you who don't fish - that's a pretty awesome fish!).

But the main point of this post if to show you one of the things we gave my dad for Father's Day that I'm particularly proud of:

Not only was it super meaningful, but it was frugal, too! We got the frame that came with the four-part matting for $5 at Walmart and took pictures of my son holding different parts of the message on piece of wood painted with chalkboard paint. Prints are super cheap (about $0.10 each). So: awesome meaningful gift for less than $6? That's how it's done, ladies.

This could be re-fashioned for lots of different occasions, but I totally love the idea of kids holding up signs to spell out messages that you can frame as a gift.