Every year I’m told I suck at the photo giving thing. I always order the kids’ school pictures, but I constantly forget to get them to my mom, sister, friends, anyone who want thems. If I do Christmas cards that year, I’ll include the pictures in the cards, otherwise people have to hound me to get them pictures of my kids.

This year I’ve decided to make it easier on myself and have a little fun. I’m doing custom photo gifts for Christmas. There’s no way we have it in our budget to have the photos done professionally and ordering the photo cards and products that way is expensive. We did that once about six years ago and it about broke our bank!

This year I got the software to make the gifts myself with my own digital photos. We have hundreds of digital photos and with this software it’s so easy to make some pretty cool things. I am making a calendar, a mousepad and some photo Christmas cards. I’m not telling who gets what for Christmas, though. I can’t spoil the surprise of which photos I’m using! The photo to the left here is the first one I made to test the software. This took me about 5 seconds to make with the software and I’ve been having a blast framing our photos instead of doing laundry. (shhh!)

I also have a wedding scrapbook I never got around to filling up and with this I’ll be able to scan our wedding photos plus use the digital ones I already have on my computer to make some pretty cool scrap booking pages. I can’t wait to finally get that done. It’s only been… 8 years since we got married… oops!

Note: Click the images for a larger view.