The Making of the Lars Family Christmas Card

I love the way our family Christmas card turned out this year. It was truly a long, drawn out project. “What was the hardest part?”, you might ask. Was it the graphic design? No. Was it the embossed stamping of thirty or so kraft die-cut rounds? No. Was it the tedious trimming of each and every photo? Nope, none of these. It was the part that I naively thought would be “super fun”. The taking of the family portrait. Simple enough sounding. Set self-timer on camera, place on tri-pod, sit with happy baby, DONE! Hahaha, I had no idea the mayhem that was in store for me. In order to illustrate the process, I must share with you the following images…

No babies were harmed in the making of this card:

Night #1  All dressed in our Sunday’s best. Noo in her little dress and Lars and I in our festive ensembles. We thought we would have the perfect shot and be done in minutes…

This is SUPER FUN indeed! Yay Christmas!

You can actually see the downward spiral…we all had a good cry.

We reconsidered our positioning. We thought surely this would go better if we all sat down. And then she ran away…

This is a horrible photo. As much as I did not want to share it…I had to. For the comedic sake of you seeing her little tush as she made her final act of rebellion. At least Cordy made it into this one, she spent the rest of the photo shoot hiding out of fear under the couch. I can’t imagine why she would be scared…

Night #2 We took a different approach. Yo Gabba Gabba on the tv, us on the couch, tripod discretely placed. Doesn’t she look ready?

Taking our time getting set up. Obviously slightly more casual with the outfits. Hoping the lack of polyester keeps her in a better mood…

And after just three shots, we had a WINNER! And even a smile! I couldn’t have asked for more…ps:That is dog food in her hand, no I didn’t let her eat it. Not even for the picture’s sake.

I hope you all had equally as good of a time shooting your family portrait this year! I am starting to realize that maybe this two night photo shoot exemplifies why people go to the mall portrait studios. Then again, can you imagine this all going down in a public venue?! Yikes! I think I will stick to the privacy of our own home, even if I do end up sharing it with all of you.

Here is the final product. I wanted to make an ornament keepsake for friends and family. So I went with kraft die-cut scalloped rounds and bakers twine, both from etsy.com. Lars and I get free photo paper with all of the ink that we buy, so I used a good bit of that. I embossed a little owl on the back to add Noo’s special touch. All in all, the whole project cost me about 22 bucks, about 75 cents a card. Not too bad!

Front and back:

I hope you got a good laugh out of our little photo shoot disaster! I know we sure did!

xoxo

04 Jan This entry was published on January 4, 2012 at 2:28 pm. It’s filed under Designs, Everything, Notes on mommyhood and tagged christmas card, family photo session, Graphic Design, homemade christmas card, kraft card. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.