Merry Christmas!

Hand-Print Christmas Ornament

A couple of weeks ago, my sister and I made these cute little ornaments with our boys. We made three of each of them, 1 for us and 1 for each set of grandparents. ☺ 

We got the instructions here, from Pinterest. They were fairly easy to make, minus the non-cooperative 1 year old I was working with. He kept wanting to stick his fingers through the dough, which resulted in 1 or 2 re-dos of rolling out the dough. But it was otherwise, an easy project. I wrote his name and the year on the back with a black permanent marker so that we could remember when we made it.

Here is my sweet boy's, cute little hand-print. An ornament I will treasure forever. ♥

My "Little Elf"

This past Sunday was our Christmas Musical at church. Jackson played baby Jesus last year and this year he was a little elf. Ha! They dressed up in little elf costumes and were pushed by Santa Claus (my brother-in-law) in a Sleigh my Dad made. My Pastor's wife found these cute little elf costumes at Cracker Barrel for the little ones to wear! They were so cute! Here's a picture of my "Little Elf", and the other little elves in the play! They were too cute!

My nephew, Mason fell asleep right before the play started, so he didn't actually get to "perform"... but, how cute is this picture of my nephew asleep in his Daddy's arms?! ♥

After the play was over, I took some pictures of whoever wanted a picture with Santa, and in the midst of that we got this picture of all the elves in their Sleigh with Santa Claus! So cute!

I'm linking up here:

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A Storybook Photography Family Photo Session

Some very good friends of ours from church, asked if I would take their family pictures for them this past weekend and I had so much fun with them. They have 5 children and their most recent 2 are twin girls! The twins are just about 6 months older than my Jackson, so I knew this could be a bit of a challenge. However, it went really well and I think we got some really cute shots.

The twins are so cute! I love these two pictures of them together.

It looks like Violet it telling her sister Caroline a secret in this picture. ♥

This is their oldest daughter Anne. She's so grown up!

Their next oldest Noah and their only boy. Poor guy! ☺

Their third child Clair! She is so photogenic and adorable!

Their oldest Twin, Violet!

And their youngest Twin, Caroline!

A fun shot of the whole family.

Praying for the Families of Newtown

How to Make a Watermark Using Picmonkey.com

I started using a watermark on my photos a few months ago. I just thought it might be a way to keep my photos a little safer. 

To make my watermark, I used picmonkey.com, which is a free online photo editing website. Its very easy to use... I love it!

I started out by clicking on the snowman picture.

 Once that was selected, I clicked on Overlays.

You'll want a black background for your watermark, so I just chose the Geometric Shapes and then the rectangle. I make the black rectangle big enough to cover the entire snowman picture. After that, I hit the Merge button at the top, to merge the black overlay and the snowman picture together.

Now its time to type out your watermark. Picmonkey has several fonts to choose from. I used channel for my watermark, but any font will work. 

After I've chosen my font, I type out what I want my watermark to say. I used my blog address for my watermark so that no matter where the picture ends up on the web, everyone knows where it came from. Once its typed out, I changed the font color to white so that it will show up on the black background. After that, I sized it accordingly (I made mine around a size 16) and move it to the upper left hand corner of my black background.

Now its time to crop your watermark. You'll go back to your basic edits and choose the crop tool. You'll crop your watermark to where very little background is showing.

After you have it all cropped, you'll click the save button and save it to your computer. I save mine to my desktop for easy access when editing.

Now I'll show you how to add the watermark to your photos in picmonkey. :-)

First you'll click on Edit a Photo.

Then, once you have your photo uploaded, you'll click on the overlays tool again. Then you'll click the button at the top that says Your Own.

At this point, you'll choose your saved watermark from your computer and your watermark will appear on your picture with the black background. Obviously, we don't want that black background, all we want is the white writing. So you'll use the size and color box we used before to make the black background disappear by clicking on the Blend Mode button. A drop down box will drop down and you'll want to choose the "Screen" mode. This will make the black background disappear and leave you with your white watermark.

Now you can move your watermark to any part of your picture you want. You can also size it smaller or larger if you'd like. You can also fade your watermark to make it blend in a little more with your picture. I usually fade my white watermark to about 25% depending on how dark the picture is. You can also make your watermark black instead of white, just by going back to the blend modes on your "size and color box" and instead of choosing "Screen", choose the mode right under it called "Subtract". 

And now you know how to make a watermark using picmonkey.com. ☺

I hope I've made the instructions as clear and understandable as possible. If you have any questions at all, please feel free to ask and I'll try my best to help you. ☺ I also understand that there isn't one right way to do this, so if you know of an easier way, please feel free to share it with me. ☺

Happy photo editing!!

You Can't Catch Me... I'm the Gingerbread Man!

This past Monday, I was over at my sister's house making hand-print ornaments like these for our boys' grandparents. (I promise a post on this next week!)  While Jackson and I were over there, my sister wanted to make some gingerbread cookies and play a little game that her oldest son had played at school the week before. (He's in Kindergarten.)

She didn't really know all the details of the game, but Landon had told her that they made gingerbread men cookies at school and one popped out of the oven and left clues for them to find him. He said he wanted to make some gingerbread cookies at home and see if one of them popped out of the oven, Ha!

So my sister and I helped him make some gingerbread shaped sugar cookies when he got home from school that day. My sister came up with some clues and hid them around the house while he was decorating one of his cookies. Once the clues and a gingerbread man were hidden, she told him that one of the cookies were missing and that he had left a clue for him to read.

She read the first clue to him and after three more clues, he finally found the gingerbread man hiding in the Christmas tree! It was so fun and so cute! He LOVED it!

Here are some pictures I took of our fun little cookie-making/scavenger hunt!

These were the clues that she came up with. We didn't know what clues they had used at school, but we just kind of rolled with it and came up with some of our own. She just cut these into strips and hid them for him to find.

Here he is looking in the last spot...

...and here's the gingerbread man hidden in the tree before he finds him.

And here he is with the found gingerbread man!

After that, we helped our little boys decorate a gingerbread man for themselves. They loved this!

You'll have to excuse my "no make-up" face! I wasn't really planning on having any pictures of myself taken that day, but I knew I wanted pictures of Jackson eating his cookie and if that meant me being in them with no make-up on, well then so be it!

My sister helping Mason decorate and eat his cookie.

We had such a fun day on Monday making ornaments and baking! We really need to have more days like that!

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