ATTENTION GATHER PHOTOGS: Great Christmas Presents You Can Make!

Each year I make Christmas presents for friends and family... In the past, I have baked fruitcakes and cookies, constructed driftwood and shell mobiles, wreaths of Spanish moss and evergreens, planted "dish gardens", sewed beaded purses made from the pockets of old pairs of jeans and other things. I did this way before the present "recession". I made my own Christmas presents as my own way of countering what I consider to be the incredible over-indulgence and commercialism of the holiday...

Because I finally acquired a decent digital camera earlier this year, I wanted to make something as presents this year that utilized some of the great photos I've been able to take to give to loved ones and that's when I came up with the idea of doing 2009 calendars with my own photos as the pictures!

First, I searched long and hard online for a "freeware" or "shareware" program I could use to make the calendars... I tried several different available "calendar makers" but finally decided on "Calendar Painter" by WASEO because it had more elements that one could control and specify. (http://www.waseo.de)

First of all, "Calendar Painter" allows for 12 different photos (some programs have just ONE photo but different "grids" for the months), you can even specify the color of the "frame" around the "grid" part of the calendar (even use "custom colors", if you wish) and the program allows almost ALL of your different type fonts to be used.

"Calendar Painter" also has a "resize" feature which can make photos that are dissimilar in size all the same size in the finished calendar and allows you to save all of the parameters you have chosen by assigning a file name to the specific calendar.

Here is a screen shot of the first of the 6 pages of "Calendar Painter" (I have chosen one of my saved "theme calendars" of Luther Burbank's Gold Ridge Farm to illustrate):



Here is another screen shot of the page which allows you to pick your photos and colors:




Here is the page where you pick the "holidays" you want the calendar to show:



And here is the last page of "Calendar Painter" showing the font choosing feature and the final printing features:



Here are 3 of the "theme calendars" I made using "Calendar Painter". I printed the pages on heavy card stock, used a hole-punch to punch 2 holes in the tops of the pages and then threaded a piece of narrow ribbon through the holes to hold them together:



(The calendar on the left is of the theme of "Birds of Sonoma County", the middle one is "Wildflowers of Sonoma County" and the one on the right is "Sunsets of Sonoma County".)

The added perk to giving these calendars as gifts is that all you have to do is slip them inside large, manila mailing envelopes to mail and the postage is quite a bit cheaper than mailing "packages"!

Hope you're having a great holiday season, Fellow Gatherers!

luv,
jean f.