7 Weeks ’til Christmas: Great Gift Ideas

Photo collages are a creative way to utilize a number of photos from the same day, event or season. Think trail ride, vacation, horse show or banquet. If you love to take photos as much as I do, any of these are likely to create a scenario resulting in “photo-excess” for the purposes of a photo album or sharing with friends over e-mail and Facebook, but perfectly suited for. . . collages!

We\’ve really gotten into building photo collages this Christmas season. Such as the one above, titled Two Ponies.

Here\’s a heart shaped collage comprised entirely of photos of our foal, Oliver, in his first few days in the world.

If you\’re adept at Photoshop, you can save your collage to a PSD format and create a printed message in the collage or manipulate the photos.

There are a number of collage programs out on the internet, but I\’m choosing Shape Collage to share with you, because it is one of the simplest to master. Plus, it\’s free. Download it, watch a three minute video, and you too, will be an artist.

Just like me.

Ha.

Wee plans on using it to create holiday messages for far-away cousins. It\’s a fun way for her to share some of her favorite photos of the year and meld them together into a personal Christmas card. Best of all, unlike most holiday crafts, it requires zero-clean-up. That\’s why she loves it so. For, you know, she usually does all the clean-up after one of her Christmas crafty adventures.

Yeah.

Not.

Which is why I love it.

Here, the munchkin created A Fall Day for y\’all.

See how easy this is?

You can use as many or few photos as you like, and choose from a variety of shapes. E-mail the final collage, post it on your blog or Facebook, or print it out.

Find Shape Collage and download it at this link: http://www.shapecollage.com/