I love to take photos of my kids and their friends. Even though the boys are now teenagers or are nearly there and the photo ops are fewer, they know it’s just easier to smile, smirk, or grimace and bear it. They know I’ll be sharing the photos with their parents and posting them on Facebok so they can tag themselves. But I wanted to do more with those memories.

Photo cards are born

Several years ago, I got tired of spending $3 or $4 for every birthday card that we gave so I decided to make cards instead. As a scrapbooker, I had the supplies for cards but just making a simple card still didn’t satisfy me. That’s when I started making photo cards or, in some cases, mini scrapbooks.

I was so thrilled by the reactions I got from the moms, I started making them for more of the boys’ friends. I started to look at the cards as gifts for moms. After a few years of this, though, I decided to try something different. Enter the canvas.

Scrapbooking as art

Last March at a scrapbook vacation, I took a class about creating decorative canvases. I loved the altered canvas project and bought some canvases on my drive home but was intimidated to make one on my own. But come fall, I got the nerve.

One friend was the quarterback for his rec football team and his team was doing well; so well, in fact, that they were playing for the championship. His mom takes even more photos than I do and posts them to Facebook so it was easy for me to create the collage (well, it was easy after the Kodak Photo Kiosk groaned under the load of her photos).

And then I jumped at altering that canvas to mount the photos on. It was so much fun that for a fleeting moment I thought I should pay the recipient for the pleasure of creating this project!

Ta-da!

I actually made two copies of this canvas because the birthday boy was having a joint party with another member of the football team and I couldn’t show up with just one of these. I wasn’t sure if the moms would “get” the project especially the mom I hardly knew. Would they think it was one step above a kindergarten finger painting?

I shouldn’t have worried. In fact, one canvas still resides in their foyer six months later.

So now I wonder…how am I going to top this?