Last-minute wrapping ideas

If you're like me and you've yet to wrap most of your holiday presents, here's a little round-up of my favorite Macgyver-esque gift wrapping projects floating around the internets this year:

Top Row: Paint chip gift tags from A Spoonful of Sugar
Middle Row: Recycled magazine gift bow from Craftster
Bottom Row: Plastic bag gift bow from Creature Comforts

Happy Holidays!

A Christmas (Card) Story...

If you remember our holiday cards last year, you probably guessed that our major inspiration was of course this:

With a touch of this:

And a hint of my mommy's old family Christmas cards:

Here's how we did it...

Supplies:

• Camera with timer
• Tripod
• Natural light (a nice overcast day was key!)
• Winter outfits
• green screen*
• Photo Editing software
• Background school scene and foreground flagpole images for a-layerin' (we used actual images from the movie "A Christmas Story")
• Retro font - ours is 'Leisure Script' from fontdiner.com (You'll notice it is not free - I wont comment on how I got my hands on it - but there are many free fonts at DaFont, 1001freefonts, etc. I LOVE fonts! But more on that in another post.)

*our "green screen" was actually a white sheet. It was pretty easy to trim that out of the background. I am not sure why green is the ideal color to subtract from the background, but I am going to assume that it is science.

Steps:

1. Setting the scene. Pick a spot with good lighting. A bright but overcast day was best for our winter scene. (Besides that, sunny-day photography has a number of unique challenges: it makes people [read: me] all squinty, washes out features on one side of the face and creates harsh shadows on the other, and is hard to photoshop into other backgrounds because the angle of the light source is so obvious.) Now, getting back to picking your location ... ideally (assuming you do not live in an extremely Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in the heart of Brooklyn, where there is zero privacy and the neighbors already think you're weird) you'd do this photoshoot outside. We of course did ours inside cramped against our living room window. The backdrop consisted of a white sheet draped over a pile of furniture. Yes, very streamlined indeed.


2. Get into costume. Since this was done on a whim one Sunday afternoon - "Matt - the lighting is perfect, it's go time!", we had to use whatever winter attire props were lying around the apartment, so we dug out our own coats and hats that we felt looked the most timeless for our vintage scene. Looked okay, in my opinion ... at least I am glad we didn't spend any money.



3. The photoshoot. Put the camera on the tripod, have an assistant model to check your framing, set that timer, and work-it. We just did this by trial and error. At one point I tried pulling on Matt's ears for extra dramatic effect, but it turns out that he was NOT ok with that. This reminds me of the one of the cherished pearls of wisdom I learned from my mother, which despite all my years of martial arts training still stands out as the best self-defence technique I've ever learned: how to yank a dude's ear off. But I digress. Keep striking a pose until you think there are enough shots to choose from.



4. Post-production. This is where the magic happens. I am in absolutely no position to give photoshop lessons because all I know is from my own trial and error. However, a few key things: it is much easier to blend separate images when they are in grayscale, and, when in doubt, blur edges.



5. Printing. Our little ink jet is a P-O-S, so we had these professionally printed. We could have been happier with the quality, and in hindsight we should have saved money and gotten postcards, but all in all the product was all right.
   

And if you are anticipating fancy cards from us this Holiday Season, just know that we plan on systematically lowering the bar each year from now on. We cant take the pressure!

Patients are people too . . .

A really neat study was reported this week at the annual conference of the Radiologic Society of North America (RSNA). It turns out that if a radiologist sees a picture of a patient's face, their CT scan interpretations for that patient will be longer and more thorough. Awww, radiologists can be warm and fuzzy when given a chance! Check it out on AuntMinnie.com.

Me-likey: The Immortal House Plant

As many of you know, I kill plants. Most recently, I killed a cactus. That's right, it can be done. The thing actually started rotting. But there is hope for me and my fellow "gangrene thumbs" (eh? get it?) out there! Behold, a fun alternative to the dusty old fake ficus tree:



Zinc-finished metal plants from Wisteria! Okay, so maybe they're still dusty, but these babies were "used in 19th-century France for winter gardens and conservatories," so they're classy. I know that I am a total sucker for marketing, but I think I am going to get one. Throw in a glade plug-in and I am in fake botanical heaven. Shame is overrated anyway.

Wait ... What?

Who got to decide that flag football was to be the official sport of the McDonald's Third Pounder?

Neat Old Stuff: Christmas Cards of Yore

Today's Neat Old Stuff features these deliciously nostalgic holiday photo-cards that my mother's family sent out in the fifties:

(1954) Grandma, Mom, Aunt Patty, Aunt Betty, and Gramps

I absolutely love this picture! It was taken by a family friend who was a photographer for the Albany Times Union. I am not sure who did the script at the bottom (maybe another staffer at the paper?), but isn't it great?! (If you haven't noticed from our blog header, I am a little bit ga-ga for vintage fonts.) And why don't they put the deckle-edges on photos anymore?

Here's another:

(1957) Aunt Patty, Mom, and Aunt Betty

This photo was taken by the same photographer at the front door of the house in Westport, NY where my mom grew up. They removed the screen. She tells me it was still warm out at the time, but they donned their gay apparel for festivity's sake. I love the way it looks like the script could have been painted on the door, but this was added in post-production.