Christmas Claws

So there's this blog called paper mama, by a gal named Chelsey, that is just the cutest.  She takes some wicked amazing photos and also seems to illustrate how you can take a not so fab photo and enhance it so it looks fab.  Such that if you have bad lighting or colors, ways to adapt it so it looks like to planned to make it look the way it does.  Or at least I think she has some posts of how she does the manipulation.  I sorta got distracted when I saw she was running photo contests.  And I suppose I'm rambling now.  Long story short... I just found her blog and am slowly investigating it when I get the free time (aka sometime in April when I'm not doing DNA quantifications in the AM and RNA extractions in the PM.).

And now to the photo contest aspect...  Each week she does a challenge and this is the current one.




This weeks challenge: Holiday colors.
The challenge: The challenge will be based around your children. Take or find a photo of your baby (or kid... or puppy... or kitty) wearing red and green... blue and white... or, whatever colors make you think of the upcoming holidays. Feel free to play around with photo editing programs! Have fun!

As we lack kids, furballs are our babies...  I went on a hunt for a kitty photo from last year.  Sadly all of our Alice playing elf were a blur.  What can I say but the little white one hates costumes. =(

So I dug further and found this photo from Christmas day (Either taken by myself or my hubs as when I'm not running a muck with the camera I hand it to him to document every moment).  It's Christmas Claws!  Her name is Zoey and she belongs to my stepmom who every year sticks the poor cat in some kind of Christmas garb.  Amazingly enough Zoey has learned to remain composed while any of our 4 cats would be chewing the darn thing off.  ;)  

Also while digging for photos, I found this gem of last year's Christmas Twig that is still tied to our wall.  The story behind the twig is that we lack the room for a full tree but wanted a tree anyway.  Our friend who owns a local shop called Wildcard has used lighted twigs in the past as store decor so we went out in the snowy trail to find a good Twig.  And hence our yearly tradition has begun of decorating the twig.  Last year was beach themed flower lights...  This year, you'll just have to wait and see.  =)

Be sure to check out Chelsey's blog, and the contest, and if this post lack coherent organization, forgive the mess as I've spent 9hrs in lab today where 7-8 straight was spending doing brain numbing work.  ;)

Christmas Cards in less than an hour!

For me to craft anything in less than an hour is a miracle as I'm a constant over thinker.  But at 2am in the morning and running on nothing, I managed to pull off a Christmas miracle.  =)

See for the past few weeks I've seen others pointing out sites they want to get photo Christmas cards from and yet others have been asking for my addy for one.  In all this, I've decided that it would be awesome to send out cards as I now have a reason to send them...  I'm no longer a single soul sharing christmas joy but a married one.  So the cards go out as a joint tiding of joy!  Woot!

I began my hunt on Shutterfly.com as we have a gift card from the wedding there.  But as all the flat cards I looked at were a minimum of 70 cents for the designs I liked.  And they were enveloped!  I wanted postcards...not regular cards.  I don't care if it gets marked or tainted by the mail process.  It gives it more flavor that way and cuts the postage down.

So I went back to my favorite friend gotprint.com.  You download their photoshop template and work within the lines to ensure you fill the bleed areas but not with important items.  It took me 30 minutes to go through our wedding photos (all 771 of them) and pick out my favorites for the card.  I resized the images (1 for front and 1 for back), copied it into the template, added text (another 15 minutes of which font looks best) and then uploaded to the site.  Well, uploaded after hubby approved of my work.  ;)  In all it took an hour and I made only 1 mistake on the final copy that might take you a bit to notice...  let me know if you find it.  ;)

The front!

And it's behind!

What do you think?  I'm betting it's gonna look great with a glossy front and 2 sides in color!