X-Ray Art

Don't you think x-rays are cool? If you have a kid, then chances are high that you'll experience a broken bone at some point. My son got a new mountain bike for his birthday, and the next day he crashed into a metal gate, dislocating his finger. While the cast that he had to wear for a month wasn't so great, the x-ray was!

So, never one for missing an opportunity to make something unique, I asked the doctor for a copy of the x-ray, scanned it in, and made a t-shirt for him to show off at school. I put the date of the accident for posterity, and he loves it!

The finger is healed, and happily, the bike made it through unscathed. The t-shirt is still in the top-5 favorites for fashion... my 4 year old wants to know if he can have one when he breaks his finger... uh oh.

Make a Photo Lamp of Your Travels!

I scored big points with this project I did for my wife a couple of Christmas's ago. A few years back, we had the awesome fortune to find ourselves unemployed at the same time. Instead of being responsible and finding new employment so that we could ensure a happy and prosperous future with our 3 year old son, we decided it would be better to go around the world for six months! I can't recommend this enough... we hung out in Thailand, Nepal, the Philippines, Turkey, China and Italy. Our son was 3.5 years old when we left, and he still brings up memories and images from the trip.

Anyway, we took a lot of pictures! We have this awesome Contax medium format camera that we lugged everywhere and took turns taking pictures of all kinds of things. When we got back, I made a couple of albums from the trip; framed a few of the better shots. But after a while, we never opened the albums, and the frames got replaced with the growing number of shots taken of our expanding family of kids and dogs.

So, I decided to make a lamp out of some of our favorite shots. I bought a Chinese lantern style tabletop lamp from Target, cut out the paper shade, and replaced it with pictures from our trip. I used this great photo transparency paper from Canon and printed the photos right on my home printer. Each photo is glued in place... and that's it. The look of the photos back lit with a soft light is beautiful. It sits in our kitchen as a warm reminder of a great time in our lives - and a promise of more good times to follow.

Family Tribe Fun!

My wife went out grocery shopping, leaving me with three kids in search of something to do. I tried the "play nice together" speech and went upstairs... lasted about 4 minutes, with the two little guys crying, and my oldest trying to break into his sister's bedroom window...

What to do... I had these cool temporary tatoos of art from a Pacific Northwest Indian tribe. We each picked one, branded ourselves on various body parts - I chose the ankle, having always thought about a real tatoo there, but unable to stomach the pain my friends who'd done it told of. We then pretended we were our own tribe, built a fort, and did some "native" arts and crafts with index cards, Sponge Bob foam stickers and markers. By the time Mom got home, we had accomplished complete demolition of the kid's bedrooms and family room. All in all, mission accomplished.

Creating a Tradition

My daughter's birthday is coming up, which made me think of a new tradition I am going to use for all my kids. We're your typical family with three kids - school, work, soccer, birthday parties, play dates, travel, errands... it's exhausting, and as a parent, it is all too easy to go days and sometimes weeks without really feeling like you've had great 1:1 time with your son or daughter. So this year, I am using the week of my daughter Yve's birthday to take a little time out each day to do things only with her. To help me concentrate on this wonderful life I get to nurture and grow with each day, I created a fun little keepsake that I'm going to wear on her birthday. I took the photo to the right and made it into a photo bracelet - a simple leather strap with a .5"x.5" sterling silver photo bead. It reminds me of the day I held her in my arms for the first time in a dark hotel hall outside of Nanning, China. It brings a warm smile to Yve when she crawls on my lap and asks to wear it. It serves as a reminder throughout the week that she is one of the lights that shines meaning on my life. It creates Christmas-like anticipation for my two sons, asking when it will be their birthday week when I will wear them on my arm.

To all the Dads, and Moms, out there - try making your own tradition. It doesn't have to be a bracelet. Maybe you put a picture on the fridge for the week; make a card you put in your car; create a photo tag for your briefcase or purse... I guarantee it will make your week, and theirs!

Is The Shoebox or Hard drive Easier?

We all have one or more; mine used to be under my bed... and in my closet, and oh, I think there still is a box in the attic. Pictures from all points of my life. Some I took, others my friends sent me, lots from Mom and Dad. Classic shots from college, embarrassing shots from my senior prom, tons and tons of shots of my kids. My Mom has always loved nature photography and regularly sends us photos of animals and birds she sees on the lake and mountain they live on in Maine, complete with captions and names for each animal on the back of the photo!

So many photos piled in boxes, storage containers and drawers, unseen for years, awaiting some elusive quiet time I will spend creating amazing scrapbooks and photo albums. Thank goodness for the digital photography revolution! No more unwanted prints, piles of photos, or un-categorized heaps. We can just shoot our pics, upload them to our home computer, and sleep easy each night knowing that the archiving of our lives through photographs is safe, organized and accessible.

Or is it? Now I have gigabytes of files with cryptic numbers for file names, and so many different ways to organize, tag, save, file and view my photos that I don't know where anything is anymore! My system tray on my desktop has so many different software program icons all running something related to my photographs, I am sure I am giving away some terrible rights to some unknown cyber foe.

All I know is that 98% of the pictures I have taken throughout my life go unseen, stored away and pretty much inaccessible. There has to be more I can do to make it easier to see my favorite images, enjoy the memories and moments captured in my mind and in photographs, and share them with friends and family. I'm going to use this blog as a way to sort out everything from cool ways to manage and enjoy my photos digitally to new ways to share them with the people in my world. I'm also going to put ideas and projects that celebrate personal style and the things that make us unique. My mantra - Dude, it's your life. Make it your own.

Please share your ideas and comments with me as well. I'd love to make this a spot for cool, creative people to share the ways they celebrate themselves and their friends and family's uniqueness.