Favourite Photo Ornaments, the 2020 Edition

Today is our annual tree-trimming party for Advent 2020! Time time to add another set of Favourite Photo Ornaments to the tree.

What are Favourite Photo Ornaments? They’re small prints of our favourite photos of our children from each year, framed or laminated in plastic, and strung with a pretty ribbon on the tree. For 2020, we now have 34 Favourite Photo Ornaments.

Now, I’ll say it before, and I’ll say it again….While we decorate our tree with pictures of our children, you can just as easily decorate yours with photos of your pets through the years, vintage family photos, or glam celebrities from days gone by. It will look freaking amazing! 

I’ve now fully committed to using clear plastic business card laminators for my FPOs instead of clear plastic dollar-store frames, as we’ve run out of the latter. In fact, I mean to go back and replace all of the frames with the laminating cards this year. The benefit of this method is that you get to use two photos per kid, producing double-sided FPOs.

Here are this year’s photos:

How do we use these to decorate our tree? We save our FPOs for last. And we hang them chronologically, starting from the top and winding down chronologically, from infancy (near the star – or, in our case, the tin zeppelin toy) to current young-adult status (lower branches).

Here are our FPOs from days gone by:

Here’s ye olde DIY:

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 photo editing software such as ipiccy, picmonkey, gimp, or photoshop 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 450×700 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

View the 2020 Advent Calendar