Color Cards

     Lately we've been working a lot with Gatlin on colors. He's getting pretty good at it but he still needs some help. So I decided to make him some flash cards and games. I did a quick search to see if there was anything I could print online for free but I didn't really see what I was looking for. In the end I decided to make these cards for him.
     Pictured is a full sheet that I laminated to use as a game board. I'm going to color code some milk jug caps and have him match the colors with the board. Then I printed out two more sets which I will use for flash cards and also as a memory matching game. I think these are going to be really good for him. He was already very excited when we played the memory game the first time.
     If you would like to use my flash cards with your own children you may go ahead and download the free pdf file. These did take me some time to make so please do not post them for sale or anywhere else on the web. I am offering you them for free because it would have been nice if I had been able to find them for free also. I didn't want to have to buy cards because my boys are very rough on things so they will need replaced quite often. So here you go, my gift to you. Just click the link below. I would love to see some comments about how you choose to use these cards. ;)

Color Flash Cards

New pics and a freebie!

I was finally able to get a fairly good picture of the brothersbad together today. Yay!! So now the header to this blog is no longer outdated. Thank goodness for that. My munchkins love to be difficult when it comes to me taking their pictures. Today I was lucky enough that Daddy was home to help and Gatlin was more interested in his movie than me photographing him.

Here are some pics from a few weeks ago when both boys were mad at me. They were not in the mood for me to be taking the pictures but I did it anyway. I absolutely love these pictures. they show so much personality.

I love photographing my boys! Well on that note I would also like to add a freebie here for you. This one is a set of two actions that I created in Photoshop CS5. These are my go to actions for resizing images for facebook. I created two actions, one for horizontal pics and one for vertical pics. I did it this way so that I can just select the appropriate one and it resizes automatically without opening up any dialog boxes. These will resize your photos so that they are 500 pixels on the longest side at 72 ppi. I hope you find them useful. Click here to download.

Wallet Template Freebie

     Here is another freebie for you. This template allows you to put two standard sized wallets (2.5" x 3.5") on a 4" x 6" print. Now I have no idea if there are other free templates out there to do this same thing but this one I'm offering was created by me. Again I was inspired by Rita's CoffeeShop Blog, I really like her action and template for putting four 2" x 3" wallets on a 4" x 6" print but in my case I also needed a couple standard sized wallets.
     You see I have an entertainment center with glass pane doors that I cut mat boards for so that I could put pictures of my kids in the "windows" so to speak. I love this idea because it keeps my entertainment center looking nice and hides the cluttered storage space as well. The thing is that when I cut the mat board I made the opening for standard sized wallets in the one door. So I have one narrow "window" that holds five wallet sized photos. I want each picture to be different so I decided to go ahead and make another template to accomodate my needs.

     Here is the link to down load this psd template file:    Wallets Template

Baby Books / Free Charm Template

     Family heirlooms are a BIG deal to me. This is the main reason that I decided to become a photographer. So I do my best to spend time working on baby books for the boys. I don't always get every blank filled in when I should but I always make time to add to them. I feel that it is important for my boys to have their baby books when they are adults. It will be nice for them to look through them and learn a little about their own history. (I am lucky to have my own baby book to look at share with the boys later)
     Well a few weeks ago I was working on the baby books when I got an idea for the little family trees in the books. I decided that it would be nice to put in little pictures of each of the relatives along with their name. This way the boys could associate a face with the name. As I'm sure many of you know there is not a whole lot of room on those pages to be adding a bunch of pictures. So I got to thinking about it more and decided that some little charm size pictures (1.25" x 1.75") would work out rather well for this. Now the next problem was how to get little pictures that small of all the different relatives. With that I decided to create a template where I could put several charm size pictures on a 4x6 print. (an idea inspired by Rita over at The CoffeeShop ).
     It has taken me a while to figure out how to create this template but I finally have it done. I created a 4x6 template that holds 8 charm photos. All you have to do is use the clipping masks to insert your pics and then send if off to be printed!

If you would like to use my Charm Template the just click the link here to download : Charm Template.

If you need instructions for using clipping masks then check out Rita's awesome tutorial Here.