Father & Son

Originally uploaded by sillyred.

We are back in Chattanooga, having arrived around 6:30. Now that we are back, it means Christmas is over and we can now talk about the gifts- the ones that we made.

Actually, I need to preface this by saying that the gifts we made were made by Damon and were his idea.

The main, big gift that Damon worked on this year was a coloring book for Albert & Linda. Damon got the idea last 4th of July and started working on it back then. My contribution to the project was to say to Damon, “Christmas is in 5 days. How is the coloring book?”

First, Damon picked out pictures of different scenes, people, and things around Albert & Linda’s lake cabin. Then he imported them to photoshop and worked some sort of funky line drawing voo-doo on the pictures and voila! We had pictures worthy of a coloring book!

On the night before we left for Alabama, Damon printed the drawings and then copied them on to newsprint. Just like a coloring book! (Which was good cause that was the overall goal.)

For the cover, Damon & I each colored in one of the pictures, he scanned them into the computer, and then printed them onto iron-on transfer paper. The next step was to iron the drawings onto poster board. That was tricky. Iron-on transfer paper is meant for ironing on to cloth. However, it is possible to iron on to poster board. But, removing the backing is very tricky. It might mess up the color. Like, it might remove it completely. Or in big splotchy chunks around the final product. After about three or four attempts, we finally ended up with two acceptable covers.

Damon stapled it all together and there it was. The perfect gift.

When we presented it to Albert & Linda they also became the proud owners of a new box of 97 Crayola crayons (with sharpener!). We gave them two books- one to preserve and one to actually have people color in. And when they fill up those pages, they have the pdf version to print out more pictures.

Eventually Damon wants to do other coloring books for other members of our family. But as a first attempt it was the best gift ever.

And later, if you still find our blog fascinating and want to read more, we will tell you all about the flip books.

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