Every year I come across wonderful, crafty, personal gift ideas for those I love. And every year, I wait until the last minute and end up ordering from Amazon or going to Target. :-/ I have been successful for some holidays, such as these wood block vacation photo displays last Christmas. (Yeah!) But more often than not, procrastination gets me or I just forget the wonderful ideas I had in mind because I think, "This is so wonderful - of course, I won't forget it!" And then I do.
It's July and months from Christmas or any family birthdays, but since we just got back from vacation (and I'm trying to beat the heat in Northern Virginia), I've been searching for fun ways to display our vacation photos and especially for ways I can share them with family. I have a perfect project idea for this year's vacation family photo, but I'm going to save it until I can share my version, so stay tuned. :-)
For now I want to share a couple of projects that I'm adding to my to-do list in hopes that by sharing, I'll sear it into my memory and just maybe start working on these projects sooner rather than later, so that when the next birthday or holiday rolls around, I'll have these ready for gifting.
I'm really excited about these photo magnets. I display many of my prints with magnets in my cube at work, so I love the idea of adding some personalization to my magnets. You'll need to use the twist-off bottle caps, rather than the pop-off ones which get bent when removing. If you're like me, you may not have these lying around, so you can order them online. A quick internet search found a bag of 100 for a reasonable price on Amazon and the same company makes caps with a ring attached, so you could make jewelry out of them too.
You can never have enough magnets. At least in our house, we're forever adding cards, photos, art projects and the like to our magnet board. Sometimes it takes multiple magnets for something to hold securely, so I love the idea of making lots of these mini photo magnets from Sundae Sins. The Polaroid look is cute, but I think I'll try to go with my squared Instagram images with white borders.
I found both of these ideas from this inspirational list over at For Creative Juice. I'll post updates when I follow through on these projects. Hopefully sometime before December! :-) In the meantime, if you have tips for beating procrastination when it comes to gift-giving, lay them on me in the comments!
Want to learn how to document your family's everyday? Check out 4 Steps to Stop Time and Savor the Moment with Your Family. It's a simple and fun guide to documenting your family's life with beautiful photographs.