Spell It Out

I had big dreams. I had big goals - but perhaps my list of projects for Christmas presents was a little more involved than I thought it was. Such was the case with this gift idea - A few years back a friend from college took these lovely pictures for me -

I had high hopes of taking pictures of my own for friends and family for Christmas. During my last trip to IKEA, I purchased 100 of these frames at 4 for 99 cents. (Read about my last IKEA visit here).

 However, as of last week, I had taken zero pictures for this project. One night I decided to walk around the house and see what letters I could collect...um, O, H, and T were about all I came up with. Not great!

Then, while browsing the wonderful world of Pinterest, my friend Tracy (read her guest post here) pinned a wonderful Flickr photo site. Hundreds, and I mean hundreds of pictures of letters, numbers and symbols. JACKPOT! Now I don't have to try to find things that look like Z and K - perfect since I was on a deadline for Christmas.

I simply downloaded the letters that I needed - This site was also great because I needed multiple pictures of some letters (Example: COOK).

I then cropped the images to a 4 inch by 6 inch size - and made all the images black and white.

 

Since I wanted to make sure that I had good quality black and white photos, I decided to print the pictures at Wolfe Camera. They did such a great job with my Christmas photos - I was sure that I would have an equally great experience with printing these images.

I decided to see if there were any "Coupon Codes" out there for Ritz Pix - And I found quite a few. Some of these may still work, some may not - but I would challenge you to always Google "coupon codes" to see what you come up with!

Here's what I ended up using:
NEW16P (Free 4x6 prints)
TRY38U92 (Free 4x6 Prints)
NEW4X6FREE (10 Free 4x6 Prints)
3OFF10 (took $3 off any $10 off purchase)
TRY54K21 (4 Free 5x7 Prints)

I was pretty pleased to take my order from $21.87 down to $1.31. Not bad for 150 high quality 4 by 6 inch prints!

This brought the total of each framed letter down to 25.6 cents each! Who doesn't love a personal, cost effective gift?!!

After laying out my letters, I established an assembly line and got to framing! (While working on this project I watched "Soul Surfer" - such a great movie!)

I had a few frames left over - I'm contemplating a phrase to put in our house somewhere. I'll probably give out a few of these as wedding gifts too!

I also thought I'd share a little Christmas decorating tip - We had some friends over for dinner last week. I was hoping to make the table festive. Wrapping paper makes an excellent table runner! In fact, I may start using brown paper all the time down the middle of my table.

If we have kids over, it would be excellent to give them some crayons to further occupy themselves at the table ( I would of course make sure they they were placed where the most paper was on the table.)