Cheap and Awesome Mother’s Day Gift!

How was your Mother’s Day? Ours was great! I told Jason that what I really wanted was to go to a park for a picnic and playing on Saturday (because Sunday was jam packed!), and then we went for ice cream. It was Clark’s first ice cream cone. Oh, don’t get me wrong, the boy has had plenty of ice cream — just not a cone to himself! He loved it!

Even better, every time he took a bite, he wanted to wipe his face off with a napkin. He’s not a tidy kid, but once he saw us use a napkin, he had to be a big boy and use one, too!

So, I know it’s after Mother’s Day, but I had to wait to post this fun gift idea because my mom can see my posts, and I didn’t want to ruin the surprise!

Both my husband and I are full-time students right now (since I had to quit real estate for the past few months due to family obligations, which without getting into too much detail, involved taking care of my grandmother after a high-risk surgery) and we’re living on very, very little but we’re pretty darn happy and learning that less is better, anyway. But when it comes to gifts, it’s pretty stressful. This time around, we had way less than I wanted for a Mother’s Day gift for our moms, so I had to come up with a creative solution.

Both of our moms are crazy for their first grandchild, so I thought back to the portrait cameo Sherry @ Young House Love did of Clara for her room – it would be the perfect gift! I set to work on a cameo of Clark for our two lovely ladies. Total cost for this project was somewhere in the neighborhood of $8 each for both the frame and matte from Hobby Lobby (during the 50% off frames week). I had the professional matte photo paper at home and fully-loaded ink cartridges from my normal Etsy order stock already.

Here’s where problem after problem happened.

First, I couldn’t get my Nikon to work again (yes, for the millionth time! but it’s working now off-and-on for some weird reason) so I had to take a cell phone pic. That meant that I had to erase the background in Photoshop by hand instead of using the magic eraser tool because the lines between the subject and the background weren’t crisp enough. And I’m not a steady eraser because I don’t have the luxury of a pen tablet. Sigh.

Mistake #2 – I tried to take a picture of my crazy mobile toddler with my cell phone camera and NO ONE TO HOLD HIM. What was I thinking??? It’s why it’s more of an angle shot, meaning you can’t see his lip profile! Creepy no-mouthed baby pictures ensued.

So, all-in-all, for the problems I had, it turned out really cute! But since my Nikon is working temporarily, I’ll recruit my awesome-sauce husband to hold the wiggling boy and take a better shot to replace in each frame. And Momma-Bear-in-Law, you’ll be getting your copy when we visit this summer since I couldn’t figure out how to mail the frame with glass.