personalize holiday cards and gifts with photos

Are you ready for the holidays? The countdown is on! My cards are in the mail, I've started gift wrapping many of our gifts and I can't wait to start my holiday baking this weekend. 

I take photos of my family all year round and for the past 21 years I have tried to incorporate a few of my favourite photos into my holiday crafting projects. Today I'm going to share with you a couple of the things that I did with my photos this year.  

I shot photos of my daughters on the beach of Lake Erie this summer and I was originally planning to use one of the pictures on the front of our Christmas cards as I always do. But I ended up doing something a little different this year. I purchased these holiday cards and personalized them on the inside with my photos.

I cropped and re sized my photo to fit the inside of my cards and added a holiday message using Photoshop. I didn't have a lot of spare time to make my cards so I printed my photos at home on my Canon PIXMA Pro-100. I love my photo printer because the photos look like they were professionally printed and I know that the colours won't fade over time.

I set up my photos so I could print twelve at a time on 13"x19" sheets of photo paper. I cut the photos out using my large paper cutter. You could use scissors to trim your pictures but a paper cutter is quicker and your finished photos look more professional.

My premade Christmas cards had rounded corners so I used the Crop-a-dile corner chomper to round the corners on my photos as well. I really like this corner cropping tool because it allows me to crop four or five pieces of paper at a time. I use glue dots to attach my photos to the cards. 

And there you go! I personalized 80 cards in just a couple of hours!

The other project that I wanted to show you are my holiday photo gift tags ...

I've created these for my family gift for many years. I like to number the backs of my daughters' photo gift cards so they have to open their gifts in the order of the tags. It makes Christmas morning a little more fun as we watch them hunt for which present to open next. 

For this project I sized and cropped my photos in Photoshop to fit my tag shaped paper punch. I printed them on my PIXMA Pro-100 photo printer at home so I would have better control of my picture size for this project. I was able to print eight tags at once using 8.5"x11" sheets of photo paper. I like to add baker's twine to my gift tags so I added a hole to each tag using this single hole punch. 

Here's a close up of one of my gift tags on a small kraft gift box that I embellished with lace and gold glitter tape, a deer figurine and a mini bottle brush tree. 

Stay tuned ... I have a few other projects that I'm working on for the holidays!