Personalize Your Holiday Gifts
by Susan Ayers Walker
With your PC, and a few web sites to inspire you, you can easily design personalized gifts that that will be enjoyed by family and friends for years to come.
Photo Gifts
Let’s start with your digital photo collection. The possibilities are almost endless: calendars, aprons, T-shirts, jigsaw puzzles, mouse pads, gift boxes, magnets, playing cards, luggage tags, coffee cups, tote bags and more. By adding memorable pictures you will make someone smile and the gift could last a lifetime.
There are several websites to help you get started like Shutterfly.com, Kodak Gallery or HP Activity Centre. All three sites have a whole list of clever gifts you can make for under $25, or you can download some free software. With Kodak, turn your photos into black and white lined-drawings to become a personal coloring book for your grandchildren.
Printable Greeting Cards
If you would like to make some personalized seasonal or holiday cards, you might check out American Greetings. They have a nice web site chock full of great ideas for cards you can customize and print out on your home printer. American Greetings has a free one-month trial so you can create a few items and see if this service is right for you. Another interesting card creation site is Picaboo.com. They have free software you can download to create lots of backgrounds and clever designs into which you can insert your digital picture. Then you can place an order to have them print your colorful card creations on good card stock and provide you with enough blank envelopes for mailing your personalized cards.
Create a Book
Are you a photographer of wildflowers and nature? Perhaps you like to cruise or travel across country in your RV to visit some of the national parks. If you have recorded your adventures in a diary and taken pictures, you can go online to several web sites to turn your travel adventures and advice into a colorful coffee-table book. Plus you can duplicate the book again and again for friends and family. Another idea might be creating a cookbook for all those who ask you to share your secret recipes. If cooking is not your passion, but creative writing is, then think about creating a colorful picture storybook customized to the age and interests of each of your grandchildren.
There are several websites that will step you through the book creation process with downloadable software so you can create a cookbook, photo journal, book of poetry or children stories. Go to Blurb.com, Picaboo.com, or Kodak Gallery. They will help you get started assembling your photos, journaling and recipes into colorful formats that you can embellish and personalize on your computer. Then, when you are ready, you can duplicate as many books as you wish to fill your gift list.
Some tricks before you start: Gather all the photos you think you might use or with a particular theme into project photo files so you can look at all he thumbnails and make your selections quickly. You might also transcribe any handwritten journals, trip notes or recipes into text documents with your computer so they can be easily spell-checked, formatted, copied, and pasted into the book creation software when you are ready to assemble a card or gift book. Most of the websites mentioned have free software templates to download and try out. Lastly, compare pricing and options of all the gift sites and for books, look at the different book templates, color combinations and page options before you start a big project.
Happy shopping!
