Favourite Photo Ornaments

Today is the first day of Advent, and as you can see from my Advent Calendar for 2017, it’s time to trim the tree. This includes making a new set of Favourite Photo Ornaments. What are these? They’re small prints of our favourite photos of the kids from the current year, framed or laminated in plastic, and strung with a pretty ribbon on the tree. In 2017, we’ll have 28 Favourite Photo Ornaments.

Now, we decorate our tree with pictures of the kids. But, you can just as easily decorate yours with photos of your pets through the years, or vintage family pics, or pics of glam celebrities from days gone by. It’ll look fab, I swear! By the way, in terms of “styling,” we like to save our FPOs for “last” when we decorate the tree. We hang them starting from the top and wind down chronologically, from infancy (near the star) to current teenage status (lower branches).

This year, since I’ve defaulted to clear plastic business card laminators instead of clear plastic frames (we ran out of the latter), I’ve decided to choose two photos per kid, and to do double-sided FPOs. So, here are this year’s photos, front and back!

FANCY! Now, here’s a DIY in the form of a recipe card!

Print Recipe

Favourite Photo Ornaments, A Streamlined DIY

Ingredients

• Digital Photos [or 2.25x 3.5 Printed Photos]
• Computer
• Photo Printer
• Photo Paper
• Business Card Lamination Sleeves
• Hole Punch
• Scissors
• Ribbon

Instructions

• Pick a favourite photo or two.
• Use your favourite photo editing software to:

  a) size your image close to a 2/3 ratio so that it will fit into a 2.25X3.5 inch holder. I tend to default to 450x700 pixels. 

  Keep in mind that you are going to punch a hole about 1/2 inch down from the top of the photo. So, crop accordingly!

  b) Make the image black and white.

  c) Create any additional borders you desire.

  d) Add the year in a festive font on the picture.
• Print your photo to approximately 2.25 x3.5 inches.
• Insert your photo (or two photos back to back) inside a laminating sleeve and seal according to package instructions. You might need to trim the photo(s) so that there's sufficient tackiness around all four sides.
• Punch a hole about 1/2 inch down from the top centre of the laminated photo.
• Cut a ribbon of about 5 to 6 inches in length.
• Tie the tail ends together with a large knot or knots larger than the punched hole.
• Slip the loop from the backside of the photo through to the front, so that the knot stops at the back of the photo. Et voila!

Notes

Here’s all of the pics on our tree from 2003-present! I’ll try to snap a decent picture of the tree this year, so you can see it all aglow….