Christmas Cards

If you're like me, the whole Christmas card thing is kind of an ordeal.  I always procrastinate on taking our family picture, then take forever looking for the cutest card with the best price and before I know it, it's January and no one has heard from us yet!  But not this year.  This year I took that bull by the horns and my cards are DONE!  Ok, not in the mail or anything but printed at least.  And the best part?  I spent a whopping $28 for 200 photo cards!  Yes, you read that right.  Here's what I did....

We took a family outing about a month ago and bribed the kids with ice cream if they behaved and smiled for the camera when I asked them to etc.  Sadly, they did NOT earn their ice cream...they were complete turkeys - yes, I'm the kind of mean mom who follows through on things like that.  I was very unhappy at the end of the experience and we ended up taking our screaming clan home without their ice cream.  Ugh.  But, that's not the whole story.  Here in SLC we have such beautiful fall colors and I wanted to capture them.  I decided taking the clan up to the foothills of the Wasatch front would be ideal.  There we found a kind biker who volunteered to snap some pics for us while we posed (did I mention we are CHEAP and don't pay to have our pictures taken?  Yes, we use the self-timer and a tripod).  Anyway, this is the kind of thing we ended up with:

Ya, turkeys right?  And what the heck am I thinking with those two huge white power poles in the background?  I thought that the wagon would be a fun prop but it ended up being a death trap for the tiny tot who wouldn't sit down to save his life. 

So, we got into the car and headed off in search of a better location.  I remembered a little bridge, tucked away in the middle of the city next to Old Navy.  It is a little piece of nature inside the city.  So, that's where we ended up.  Really, I couldn't believe we actually got any 1/2 decent pics out of the day but I did end up with one that was "editable" enough to use (since I'm not about to subject us to that kind of torture again). 

Next, I took said image and imported it into Picnik.  I have photoshop on my computer but it takes so long to open and use on my 4 year old ancient laptop that I prefer to use something quick and easy like Picnik.  If you haven't found it yet it will change your life!  I am addicted.  It's so easy to boost color and edit photos with fun effects!  You'll love it.  Here is the photo that we started with:

No one would sit still.  But I guess it kind of captures our life right now!  So, I then headed on over to picnik.com and made it black and white, boosted the contrast and faded the effect a little so that some of the green showed through and then I added text to make it our Christmas card.  They have a ton of fun fonts you can use and it's all FREE!  Here's the finished product:

No bad eh?  So THEN I got online and sent the sucker to Costco's 1-hour printing service (I've searched around a bit and have found that Costco really does have superior quality compared with the other brick and mortar businesses I've tried).  I ordered 200 copies, matte finished with a white border for $.13 each and picked them up 1 hour later!  Yahoo!  Anyway, I'm supposed to be printing out my envelopes right now but instead I'm blogging about my great deal.  Again, I'm a procrastinator.  Happy holidays!