Love Collage, aka Christmas is coming!!!

Now, don't shoot the messenger but there are only 95 days until Christmas.  That sounds like a lot?  Well I'm here to tell you it isn't.  Not if you make homemade/handmade gifts it isn't.  You need to start looking for ideas now.  This particular idea isn't one that I made for a Christmas gift (although it might morph into one for a grandparent at some point in time) but I thought it was a perfect, inexpensive idea that anyone could easily use as such. 

I'd like to take credit for this idea but I originally spotted this on pinterest.  (Do you have a pinterest account?  If so, then follow me!  And I'll follow you!  I love great ideas!... just ask my husband who says that I pin everything.)  The inspiration photo is HERE. 

Michael and I both have birthdays in August, and we also have our wedding anniversary in August.  This year was admittedly a neglectful one.  When one is in the process of building a house, one tends to sacrifice all gifts in order to buy such things as fixtures and lightbulbs.  That's not to say that I didn't give Michael a gift.  I just tried to get very creative with it.  We took the following pictures and made a collage out of them. 

After Aidan and I took these pictures, and more than just these by the way but about a hundred to get the ones I thought would work, I put them into a frame, carefully making a collage out of them.  I wanted a fairly small frame and I just purchased a landscape frame at Walmart and I think between printing the pictures and the frame itself this whole gift cost under $5.  This is the finished product, as featured on Michael's work desk:

I did have to piece it together slightly using background pieces in certain corners, cropping here and there.  I loved how it turned out though.  And I didn't hear complaints from the husband either, although he knows better than to question a handmade gift, lol!

Thanks for looking and I hope that you get inspired in some way!

If you don't know what Pinterest is, it's a site dedicated to organizing favorite things.  When you sign up for an account you can designate certain "bulletin" boards to pin your favorite links, pictures, places etc. to.  The best part is that it allows you to pin a picture with the link, not just a link.  It gives a great online home to your "favorites" rather than having them saved on one computer or having to filter down through a list of links to figure out what you want.  Looking at the pictures gives you instant knowledge if something is what you're looking for.  You can re-pin someone else's favorites, or you can install a "Pin It" button in your browser, allowing you to pin anything you like.  If this sounds interesting to you, let me know and I can send an invite to your email.