Mother's Day Gifts

If your name is Mischell or Machiel (ironically, both pronounced like Michelle) and you're my mom or mother-in-law, look away!! Otherwise, keep reading.



No, really. Look away.





For Mother's Day this year (unlike previous years) I decided to actually DO something. And I saw this fantastic idea over at The Inadvertent Farmer:



Isn't it fantastic? She did it for Valentine's Day, but I thought it would be fun for Mother's Day. Now my mom is Nana to her grandkids (2 with another on the way! not me...), which works really well for the 4-picture frames, but we call my Mother-in-Law (MIL - look! you learned some techno-shorthand!) Gramma, so I wasn't sure how that one was going to work. Luckily, my husband had the great idea to do some pictures with two letters in them.

But I digress, we'll talk about the Nana pics first. It was pretty straightforward. I got my SIL (sister-in-law, get it?) to take some pictures of my 3-year-old nephew holding an N and an A. (I just formatted them for an 8.5"x11" printer paper; no fancy stuff when you're trying to pull it together with someone 2,000 miles away and send it another 1,000 miles to the Nana.) A 3-year-old can understand holding a paper and getting his picture taken, so those worked out great. The two with MY son are the comedy-of-errors pictures. He's just basically doing whatever he wants, and my husband's holding the paper while trying to stay out of the picture. I like them, though. Then I used a BW action from one of my photographer friends in town and also added a sepia tint to complement the frame. And I love how it all came together. But after all that rambling, you'll have to wait for a picture! I completely forgot to take one before I sent it. I'll upload at least the pics later tonight so you have an idea and then get my mom to take a picture when she gets it. :)

My MIL's was a little easier because all her grandkids are here in town. We decided we'd try one pic with the G and the R and the three oldest grandkids (4, 2, and 1 - we didn't want to risk the brand-new baby in all that fuss). My nephew and niece on that side ALSO understand the concept of holding still for a picture, so we have a few where Lincoln (my 1-year-old) is kind of thrown in and we tried to get a pic before he crawled away. I happen to think those are pretty dang cute. Then we tried to get one with my niece holding an A in front of her belly. That one she didn't get it. It was either in front of her face or over her head. (In fact, the R is over her head in the first pic, too.) Also very cute. Then my nephew held the two M's like a champ! Definitely the most straight-forward pic. And we used the same A for my MIL's as for my mom's. Handy, that. I stuck with the BW action since my MIL's frame is black, dodged in a few places to lighten some shadows, but did very little editing all-in-all, and here's my finished product!

(Click on the pic to see it larger. Also, the picture quality is kind of bad;
it's rough to take a picture with the glass in the frame!)

I LOVE how it turned out. No surprise I used varied fonts for a more whimsical look. ;)

I'll be linking to the parties on the left.