Update to November 11 post: The Perfect Gift for Grandparents

This weekend I received the last batch of personalized photo gifts, including the calendar I made for my parents-in-law.  As I said in my November 11 post, I decided to use mixbook.com this time to create the calendar.  I was very lucky because just when I was creating the calendar, Mix Book had a buy one get one free deal so I was able to get 4 calendars for the price of 2 and will give the other ones to my husband's siblings.  This way everyone can keep track of the birthdays and anniversaries in the family.

Anyway, all is all, I was super happy with Mix Book.  I found there were many templates to choose from for the calendar. I used this template design:

Via Mix Book

And the most important part is that I was able to add as many photos per page as I needed.  This made making the calendar so much easier and faster - a big bonus.  As I mentioned in my November 11 post, previously I used Costco's calendar template and wasn't able to add more than one or two pictures so I had to create collages in Picasa of multiple pictures then upload them to the calendar - a big hassle.  Unfortunately with Mix Book you have to pay shipping, but I think it is worth it.

Hope my in-laws love it!

My tip of the week!: Gift of the five senses

When I first met my husband and was just getting to know him, I found it hard to figure out what to buy him as a first birthday gift.  A thought came to mind that when I was in elementary school we sometimes gifted what we called "combo" gifts.  It was a box full of little items that had meaning instead of one or two bigger items.  So I thought I would get creative and do a gift of the five senses.  This involved me finding a relatively small gift that would represent each sense (sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch) which also had meaning for him and I.  This was almost seven years ago and unfortunately back then I didn't think of taking pictures of what I put together - I didn't think I would be blogging about it and sharing it with the world!

What I do remember are the items I gave him:
TOUCH - A soft scarf that I purchased from the Bay
TASTE - His favourite chocolates - Reese's Peanut Butter
SIGHT - A DVD of the first movie we saw together (Hitch with Will Smith!)
SMELL - Massage oil with the essence of vanilla (his favourite scent)
HEARING - A CD with a collection of all the songs we liked (back then I wasn't using an iPod!)

I placed the items in a nice box and had a note describing what each was, what sense it represented and what it meant to me or us.  The only thing I have left from the gift is the actual gift box I used, as it is being used to store cards received from friends.  Here it is...I had wrapped it with a nice royal blue ribbon:

I searched online to see if I can find anyone else that had the same or similar idea and I found this great post on The Dating Divas' site.  I love what Tara has done.  She really went all out by nicely tagging each item and I love the name she picked for her gift "I Love you with all of my senses".

Via The Dating Divas

  And her gifts were individually tagged as follows:

Via the Dating Divas

Great job Tara from The Dating Divas, the gifts look wonderful!

For all those men reading this blog, this would also be a great idea for your significant other...she will love you for being so thoughtful and creative.  Plus this gift idea can be adapted to suit any type of recipient.

The perfect gift for Grandparents

Last year, my grandparents, who live overseas, were visiting us just before Christmas.  Before they left I gave them a gift that made them cry, and frankly made me cry - a CALENDAR highlighting their family, children and grandchildren.  I gathered all birthdays and anniversaries of their children and their grandchildren as well as photos of all and wedding photos of each couple (It took a lot of time to gather the best pictures - but it was well worth it at the end).  The calendar cover had an old picture of my grandparents showing them young and showing how it all started - they couldn't believe I found this photo.

For each month I marked the date of anyone celebrating a birthday or an anniversary and I posted photos of the persons celebrating a birthday or anniversary that month.  I stuck to wedding photos (if I had one) for the anniversary pictures as I found them more romantic and meaningful.  For December, it so happened that no one celebrated a birthday or anniversary, so I did a family tree with family photos.  If you don't have anniversaries or birthdays to fill the entire year, you can get creative for the particular month, for example if August is missing, maybe post some photos from a family BBQ that took place in August.

I used Costco's Photo Centre as I am used to printing my pictures at Costco and found their program easy to use.  The only draw back is that the template only allowed me to add one or two photos, so I used Picasa to arrange the photos and then uploaded them to the Costco website to use as the picture of that particular month.   [Side note: I LOVE Picasa, if you haven't downloaded it, you should.  It makes it easy to create collages - I will certainly talk more about this on another day].    Here is an example of how the month of April looked.

This year, I am making a calendar for my in-laws for their children, grandchildren and even great grandchildren!  I have started to use Mixbook for photo books and I love the website and the variety of templates and ease to use, so I am going to try using this site for their calendar.  Will let you know how it goes!