It’s a shame that Christmas is the busiest time for all my businesses as it’s really hard to find the time to make unique gifts for friends and family. I did manage a few though!
This year was so busy that I had to scale back on my handmade personal cards. Usually, I make around 30 but this year I just made 6! It features a paper cut Christmas pudding that you might recognise from my Penny Black Christmas window. Everyone else got a digital version I had printed from the original.
I had an idea for a pom pom snowman in my head and it turned out even cuter than I imagined! It all came together when I added the mini pom poms for eyes and cheeks. I made it for my sister and it got a little bit squashed in transit, and is a bit more fragile than I’d like, but I still love it. I will probably do a tutorial for this later in the year.
I knew exactly what I wanted to buy for my dad’s present, but it turned out it doesn’t exist. He bought a DSLR camera when he retired and hasn’t really been using it. I know from experience that a daily project is great for starting a habit so I created some daily photo prompt cards and had them printed at Moo.
The idea is that you pick one at random every day and then choose one of the four prompts to follow. Some are technical or composition rules that might need a bit of research and practice and others are just subjects or ideas that might inspire a subject or force a different approach. There are also a few one off cards (like the blue one) with more complicated tasks. It was really fun coming up with all the prompt ideas and I tried to keep them quite open so they’ll work at home, on holiday, in bad weather etc., plus there’s no set schedule so you can skip a day or do more than one. I’m glad to say the cards have done their job and my dad has been taking lots of great photos every day.
I was really surprised that none of the sites that set monthly Instagram photo challenges have made something like this. If I had the audience, I would totally manufacture these for sale.
