I'm Janimal, happily gainfully employed Momma to a sweet girl. Livin' it up in Atlanta with a great husband and a good job. Sometimes I make stuff and here's my spot to show it off! Life is good, so I'm sharing....
Showing posts with label halloween. Show all posts
Showing posts with label halloween. Show all posts

Monday, September 13, 2010

Front Yard Cemetery Decorations

It's almost HALLOWEEN!
Oh yeah!
Which means it's time for a spooky neighborhood cemetery in our yard. Each year we add to our decor and it gets spookier and spookier. Here are some pics from last year.



(The men in our cul-de-sac all have their own headstone. Al is a neighbor, Larry is my husband, and our friends get a good chuckle out of his.)



That back headstone for our other neighbor reads "Here lies MR POOLE - fell off a stool, now HE'S A GHOUL"

These headstones are the cheap foam ones you can buy at your local drugstore for a few bucks a piece. I simply turned some around and painted on the backs with white acrylic paint. They have held up remarkably well to the elements and the weathering effect makes it just creepier! This year I may add some of the neighborhood ladies to the cemetery - I just have to work out some rhymes.
There are also bright orange twinkle lights wrapped around our trees and throughout our bushes. Bring on the trick or treaters!
Happy Halloween everyone!

Making
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Tuesday, May 11, 2010

I Love Picnik.com!

My blog today is about the magic of Picnik.com. (Online photo editing - easy to use and FREE!)

This post is also a fun way for me to show off some pictures of my adorable child. :-)

Picnik.com is a wonderful website to help non-technical non-Photoshop users like myself enhance their pictures. It's so easy to use, even I can use it! I am strictly a point-and-shoot uneducated camera wielder myself. Picnik saves my photos from awful to adequate. Imagine what a good photographer could do! Many of the features of Picnik are free. A reasonably priced membership provides many more features. All easy to do. (I LOVE MY SUBSCRIPTION!)

Simply upload a photo, and tools like blemish erasing, caption adding, teeth whitening, color correction, cropping, and other editing is easy peasy.

EVEN A poor photographer with NO skills to photoshop like me can take ordinary pictures and turn them into fun cards and photo gifts! You can too!

One of my favorite things to do with Picnik is to play with photographs and add captions so I can turn them into greeting cards on Shutterfly.com. We have a young family member who has been fighting cancer and our way to cheer him up was by sending silly greeting cards. Here are some of my favorite Picnik enhanced photos:

Ok, there's a backstory on that one. My BFF used to work for DisneyWorld. And she's one of those Disney obsessed people who goes crazy for Disney stuff. For YEARS she has been buying me Disney crap, er, I mean stuff and for years I have been protesting. She bought this little outfit for Delilah so I took a really cute picture of her wearing it to send as a thank-you. But this outtake photo was WAY more fun to turn into a card. Don't worry, she knows I was actually grateful for the gift and continues to send us Disney crap!
Another greeting card from Delilah
Don't call child protective services - I didn't really feed a 6 month old salt and vinegar potato chips.

Ahh, this was a greeting card too. The ball pit created many photo ops!

Here is my 2 week old baby in a milk-coma posing with her doggy for their first Halloween. What you can't tell in this pic is that our sweet doggy's eyes were a bright glossy blue in the original photo. The red-eye correctors in Shutterly and Snapfish don't correct pet eyes, but there is a handy easy tool in Picnik to do just that. (Note the matching bib and doggy kerchief, I made those!)



For the following Halloween, I used some premium Picnik features to make this next one into a card. You know some friends asked me if I actually put zombie make-up on my child>!>!
And since I had so much fun with the Halloween Picnik tools, I made one where she's a sparkly Twilight like bebe vampire. It's a bit creepy.

These photos were cropped, turned into a collage, and the colors boosted with just a few clicks for a Father's Day gift last year.


And last year, as I worked on a March of Dimes fundraising campaign, I turned Delilah into the spokesbaby. I started sending out emails featuring her cutie-patootyness asking for donations and participation via Picnik enhanced photos.

Here is this year's Valentine's Day card. The teddybear was added with just a click on Picnik. I cut a couple slits in the photo on her hands and slipped in a DumDum lollypop - so it kind of looked like she was holding the pop. Awwwwww.
So there you go - the magic of Picnik.com! Please note that I am simply a user of Picnik. I have to pay for my subscription like everyone else and am not compensated in any way for broadcasting my love. This post was fun for me to show you some pics I think are funny/cute, and let you know that you too can do some fun things with your photos without needing any mad skillz or expensive software to do it.
Later skaters!
Janimal