Wall hanging project with freebie 4X6 prints

If you find yourself contemplating the irony of taking a LOT of photos, but not having too many in actual physical hold-in-your-hands prints, you can clear out your digital backlog pretty much for free by taking advantage of coupon codes for free 4X6's that photo services offer very frequently.  I mean really frequently.  As in, I've received 105 4X6 prints from Walgreens alone this month! You can find freebie codes online (try google searching them), from other bloggers (I like the Freebie Junkie, most of her posts actually work), and by creating an account with a couple photo services like Walgreens, Target, or CVS, and letting them email you special offers.  Today Walgreens emailed me codes for 15 free prints (free4x6) AND a free desktop calendar (freeforu) (only good for today, Nov, 5th).

Unfortunately, the quality of some of these services is less than stellar.  I've printed better-quality photos from my photo printer on photo paper, but that is quite costly.  Finding and using freebie codes is a good way to test out a particular service before you actually spend money there.  It seems like some companies try to auto-enhance your photos for you, which is not a good thing if you digitally edit your photos yourself.  If your colors are already bright and pretty in your digital file, the generically-applied "auto-enhance" treatment makes them look almost neon, and sometimes downright garish.  Photos you've edited to be sepia or black & white, in my opinion, come out the best.

You may also want to manually crop your images to the size you'll be ordering (such as to 4X6) because if their computer does it, you get some random results (heads partially chopped off, etc.) depending on where they auto-center the image.  Walgreens offers a "digital" size that's slightly smaller than 4X6 where it fits the whole image to the space, instead of cropping some away, but most just center and chop.  Unfortunately, it auto-recognizes which files it things are from a digital camera and offers to do this just for those.  ALL of my photos come from a digital camera, but it only has recognized a few.

Be wary of the services that let you pull directly from Facebook.  Yes, that's super quick and convenient, but the images have been compressed in FB, and you'll get some grainy, fuzzy, inferior prints (some will work, but most will be 'blah' at best).  If you've lost some of your photos on your hard drive that you have on Facebook, you can select "download" from FB when you view the image, and then if using windows, there will be a feature to edit in Picasa (a free program I use for most of my quick & easy edits) where you can save in higher quality to your computer.

The bottom line: you'll have to experiment A LOT with settings -on your end and by learning the idiosyncrasies of each service before you can get reliably good prints, which is why it's great to get them for free--less disappointing when they don't turn out like your perfectly-edited digital file.

So your stock of freebie photos is growing, now what?  I sorted mine into the good, the ok, and the trash pile.    With the ok photo's, I've chopped these up to fill all the little photo frames we've accumulated:  oddball sized frames we've filled with family photos for our 3 year old's room, even a couple Spongebob Burger King kiddie meal refrigerator-magnet photo frames.  You get the idea--Frames you wouldn't waste your best photo prints on.  Collages or other crafting uses for these prints would be another good way to put these "ok" quality prints to use--just check out Pinterest for more ideas than you can hope to accomplish!

I just made this little project with some of my freebie 4X6 prints that came out quite nicely (all sepia).  I have quite a collection of nature photographs I've taken at the various Columbus, OH Metro Parks this year--mostly macro shots of insects, flowers, seeds, mushrooms, moss, or anything else of textural interest.  My husband and I picked out 15 of our favorite, and I used them to create this wall hanging.

Supplies for my model:  36" square dowel rod, painted with acrylic, I used "metallic espresso," a number of photos which appear aesthetically pleasing together,  the same number of 3X3 sticker-backed card stock squares in neutrals (scrapbooking supply), three 36" lengths of 2"-wide ribbon, three flat-headed thumb tacks, ruler, 2 brad nails, hammer, level, painter's tape.

I spent a considerable amount of time deciding what photo would go where--being mindful of many aspects: orientation (vertical or landscape), busy-ness or pattern (some have many details throughout the whole photo, some were more simple), subject (I used all nature prints, but of these some were insects, butterflies, flowers, etc.), and coloration (some of my freebie 4X6s had printed with more yellow hue to the sepia than others), and anything else that affects how the eye perceives your photos as they lie next to each other.  Keep in mind where your eye will see the installation first (depends on where & how high you plan to hang it) and place your very best or favorites there.  This is more difficult than it seems:  not only must you be aware of how a particular photo looks, but how it looks above/below/beside another, AND how the whole group looks!

When you finally figure the above out, I recommend marking their position on the back.  I used a simple coordinate system (e.g. 2,5 for row 2, 5th photo) so you don't have to try to remember your set-up once you stumble on arrangement perfection.

I hand-folded the scrapbooking cardstock stickers into mounts which just showed at the top of the photos, but you could omit this, or mat them all, or whatever you like.


I evenly spaced the ribbon strands, tacked to the back of the dowel with a flat-head thumb tack, let the ribbon wrap around to the front of the dowel, and secured the photos with painter's tape to the ribbon, also evenly spaced.

You could do a horizontal ribbon & clothesline version, whatever you like!

Living in an Amish-ish Paradise, (part one in a series on frugality and consumerism)

That Weird Al nod started my Facebook post yesterday in which I couldn't help but exclaim the awesomeness of an age-old homemade laundry detergent recipe I found.  With 15 minutes of effort and $1.71-worth of deliciously cheap, natural, raw materials I whipped up 5 gallons of a sparkly-clean-scented liquid laundry detergent good for 320 regular loads.  The Look-What-I-Made high from this endeavor propelled me on a trek through the blogosphere to glean what other consumer household products could be replaced with these cost-effective, natural, homemade solutions.

Turns out there's an entire community based around the principles of make-your-own and do-it-yourself that goes far beyond home decorating and flea-market refurbishes.  Now the concept of taking homemade to a whole new level has been exiting to me since I first discovered that homemade bread was, in fact, perfectly do-able.  Yes, any new endeavor requires some experimentation and skill-building, and just as I'm a better cook & baker now than I was 5 years ago, so it goes with all new projects.  Overcoming a lack of inertia, rolling up your sleeves and getting dirty (sometimes literally) in the quest for the Next Cool Thing to Learn to Do, is a regular occurrence.  You just have to get started.  And you have to learn to take failures in stride.  Not every new recipe, jewelry-making or sewing technique, art project (or parenting trick!) will work--and failures will run the gamut from Not What I Was Hoping For to Colossal Fail.  Heavy sigh.  Clean it up.  Move On.

So with this in mind I'm perfectly willing to have a go at whipping up some homemade bath & body products like shampoos, body washes, soaps, lotions, and replacing commercial cleaners & detergents with homemade, natural (and cheaper!) concoctions.  But what I've found most interesting is the various motivations behind different individuals' choice to pursue a homemade lifestyle.

There are various reasons to eschew many consumer goods for DIY alternatives: financial, health & safety, concern for the environmental impact of these products, and rejection of consumerism & a disposable lifestyle in general.  Reading individuals' arguments for these various perspectives has prompted me to examine my own ideas on these hefty  issues and how they fit in (or help shape) my overall life philosophy.

My first encounter with going homemade was driven by wholly creative pursuits.  From an early age I've been compelled to create, to make, to tinker.  I love the process of transforming things from their raw materials, full of potential energy, to their kinetic apex.  The process is a cathartic form of self-expression and an exercise in self-confidence that comes from making something with my own hands.  This has lead me to pursue (albeit slowly) a creative entrepreneurship as well as expand my repertoire of Things I Can Do in life in general.

These days, under the pressures of this recession, money (more specifically, money problems) is on the forefront of many peoples' minds.  Many people are hurting.  People who aren't yet hurting are anxious they might.  Some people, of course, are confident that they will be perfectly fine and not have had to make many or any changes to their lifestyle.  We are not those people.  My friends are not those people.  In fact, I don't personally know too many of those people.

Because of this, financial reasons have driven me to examine ways to shave off non-essentials and replacing pricey (yet often inferior quality) consumer goods with natural homemade alternatives.   With our alternating job losses, this makes the second year of being pretty darn poor, worse, pretty darn poor with a kid (or because of the kid).  With the cavernous gap between the infinite list of Things I Wish We Could Buy or Do (is anybody's list finite?) and the instability of income from work, part time work, and the family business--the reality is more like some weeks (or months) finding an extra $20-$40 for a fresh hair cut is just as much on the Not Gonna Happen list as finding $20-$40,000 for a new car.

Just as economic analysts and media pundits have suggested, it's just another example of the "new reality" of an economic condition that's probably going to be around much longer than we'd like to think. For us, our New Reality means we can't get away with superfluous expenditures like eating out for dinner frequently, going to full-price movies, stopping every morning for (a shamefully unhealthy) breakfast & coffee, mindlessly plucking every whim off the grocery shelves, recreational shopping, and more.  How's your New Reality looking?

The first step in overcoming that jarring "this sucks" reaction is making peace with your New Reality. You can either wallow in the craptasticness of the situation, lamenting the new restrictions on your consumption, insisting that you'll never experience fun again--OR you can suck it up and adapt.  After a brief period of mourning of course, we've decided to push on towards the latter.  And we're not alone.  The people I hang out with the most are in similar situations, and there's no need to feel judged or insecure about being frugal and thrifty in order to adapt to New Reality.  If you're in this boat, know that a lot of people you encounter during your daily life are too.

Now our New Reality looks more like state and metro park trips, dusting off the board games (or brushing up on Rock Band) and dining with friends at the dinner table instead of noshing at a restaurant, hitting the library instead of Barnes & Noble, brewing coffee instead of buying, shopping planned trips to Aldis instead of getting whatever looks good at the moment at grocery stores, thrift-store perusing (call it Goodwill Hunting, it will make you smile) instead of the mall, seeing movies at the dollar theater and smuggling in snacks instead of forking out the cash for the new-releases, mending,  refreshening,  or refurbishing clothes and other goods instead of tossing them at the first minor defect or from boredom, cooking more at home, making pitchers of teas & lemonades instead of buying beverages, and more.  Baby steps, my friend, and we've come a long way towards happily existing within our means even when those means shrink.

The good news is that making the most of doing with less is ripe with creative potential, which has been a great coping mechanism for me.  I'm learning to look around at things in a new way--looking for ways to breathe life into old things so they feel just as exciting as if I had ditched them for the Next Cool Thing the store display, TV, or magazines told me I wanted.  The next exiting discovery--the potential of homemade household goods which can be whipped up to my specifications with my own two hands out of natural, good-smelling, toxin-free raw materials for less than commercial alternative and with far greater satisfaction.

Bring it on.

Why can't I get anything done... oh yeah, I have a 3 year old.

I've been off work at my "day job" for the past week, and yet, I feel as though I have accomplished less business-related 'stuff' than I normally do. Is there a time-vampire sucking minutes from my days? Is there a fourth-dimensional time-fold somewhere in our apartment that transports me from early morning to late afternoon unbeknownst to me?

Alas, nothing so interesting. It just so happens that Avigael, our three year old daughter, manages to consistently throw a wrench in the gears of my efficiency. It seems as though I spend most of the day either entertaining Avi (which involves coming up with new ways to keep her little magical mess-making hands busy) or cleaning up after her.

Avi is notoriously precocious whenever she's not occupied. Idle hands are indeed, the devil's plaything. What could I possibly think of to entertain my daughter? Why, arts and crafts of course. I've stocked up on Play Doh, watercolors, construction paper, glue sticks, little scissors, foam shape stickers, pony beads, craft lace, markers, crayons, Biggie Beads (the toddler-friendly version of Melty Beads), and much, much, (argh! clutter!) more. Is it starting to become apparent why so much clean-up?

Organizing Ideas for the Collection of Kiddie Craft Crap
(continued)

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