Aug 21

14C and cloud just moved in.

20 minutes ago, the sky was clear and it looked like another hot one, now not so much.

Yesterday we watched our novice bowlers play off for club champs the the two winners will go to the BSI to compete with all of the south island.

Car washing day today, then Sunday bowls this afternoon.

Here is a little thing I did seven years ago, perhaps it's worth a chuckle.

Making a Collage

We have all seen some of those wonderful family collages, a collection of pictures from family gatherings and other events.  If you have ever tried to put one together, you know that one of the problems is fitting pictures to the various shapes and their sizes or there are too few or too many spots for the pictures to be placed.  Depending on the theme of the collage, there is often the problem with color photos versus black and white.  Why not make your own?

We are currently planning a family reunion for this spring and my wife wanted a collage for the White Elephant Sale we are having as a part of the event.  Soooo, I said no problem, I can do that!  Well now I know I can do it, but there were a few problems!

In our situation we wanted the collage to be headed by my wife’s great grand parents and then include their 10 children and their spouses.  This caused the first problem as we couldn’t find a frame that contained 11 places for pictures.  The second problem was that one of the children had died at age 1 and there was no picture of him or his gravesite.  The third problem was that we did not have pictures of all the other children.

Without getting into all the detail, here’s what we did.  Emailed or phoned all the relatives and begged for photos, after a short while and a few reminders we basically had a variety of photos both black and white and colored of all that we wanted except for the baby.  I went on line and found a place where you can download "clipart” and found a very nice cross and imported it All photos and the cross we saved as Jpegs, then cropped the pictures to exclude people other than the ones we wanted, then using “paint shop” neutralized the backgrounds and took out the odd arm or other remaining bits.  Then all the selected color photos were converted to grey scale to conform to the effect we wanted.  I already have a photo printer, so was able to customize the size of prints.  So far so good!

A visit to a “Craft Store” revealed that you can purchase plastic templates with assorted shapes and sizes, as well we found a photograph cutter at a reasonable price. Bristol board in a variety of colors was also found.

We cut the bristol board to size and then on the backside spaced and penciled in the shapes we wanted from the templates and then using an ordinary exacto knife, cut out the shapes.  The pictures were placed and we added the names of each person on the front side.  We used a fancy font for this last, but  calligraphy would be better.

The next time I would stay away from circle or oval shapes as you have to freehand your cutting with them and that adds to the difficulty of producing a neat edge.  Multi sided shapes would be as attractive.

Happy Crafting!

John Little

2004