christmas project 2011

like every other year, the grand old debate begins once again, about whether we should do any Christmas gifts. i suppose last last year (2010), we had a good excuse not to, since we were about to get married within 7 days. so we invested on these instead.

but we had no excuse this recent Christmas, hehe :) and so after some deliberation and discussion, we embarked on a journey to create these...

thank God for a fruitful time, and for how things still turned out despite the hiccups we had. doing such gifts gives us time to ponder on each person who has been a blessing to us throughout the year, especially when we type notes for them and think back on the year of friendship/fellowship. also, we wanted our gifts to point to the perfect Giver, who has given us the perfect gift. hopefully, these sticker calendars will enable each of us to look to God in the rest of the days He (God-willing) gives us for the year.

first, we printed the calendars on A4 sticker paper, readily available in every bookshop. Editing the photos was done on photoshop, with the help of polaroid frame templates found on Fuzzimo - a site definitely worth checking out if you're into graphic design. The fonts i used more often are Print Clearly (for the dates) and Day Roman (for the month). Thereafter,  i used Powerpoint to arrange 14 images per sheet and printed them out using my trusty old Epson inkjet printer.

we did lots and lots of cutting. think: the number of people we love x 12 months = an EXPONENTIAL AMOUNT of stickers to cut out. what you see in the pictures are not all! to make full use of time, we would bring the box of stickers and 2 pairs of scissors around so we could work on the cutting whenever we had free pockets of time.

after the cutting, we needed to sort the stickers according to their months....

then, we tucked them into (commonly seen in FITW) white glassine bags. our original plan was to print the greetings on the bag itself with inspiration from here. however, to our dismay, the glassine bags were too slippery and thin and the printer simply could not work. hence, we had to change plans. we ended up printing them on sticker paper and cutting them out ourselves.

 

looking at these photos make me realise why i love photography so much. everything, from God's creation, to His people, to scenery, to the movements of His creatures, can be seen with a godly perspective and can remind us of what kind of God we have. indeed, they are proof that we have a God at Hand (Hebrew: Elohay Mikarov), near to us, revealing to us who He is and what He requires of us.

p.s. you will probably see these photos popping up on my blog throughout the year :) i hope what they express will be a blessing to you, to point you to God :)