Summer Coloring Fun and Father's Day...

Hi! The last couple days my crafting has been more the Popsicle stick and paste variety with my kids so I don't have a card today, LOL! But in the process of crafting with them I have discovered a few fun things to pass along (and one can be applied to cards I just need to finish it!) I thought I'd share this idea first because it is a fun way to beat the heat this summer and also could be fun for a Father's Day gift from your children.

The other day we were at the store and the kids begged for yet another Crayola 64 Crayon pack. But this time I noticed it contained a code inside that would let kids create cool coloring pages from their real photos on the Crayola website. I was sold! (Maybe this time they'll end up returning them to the box instead of them all ending up broken in half in a bucket of half dried out markers! fingers crossed!) We came home, logged onto the site and printed out a bunch of the kids' favorite memories of themselves and our family to color. Here is one of a photo I posted of William recently that he filled in. The Crayola site also has things for them to add to the photos like fun backgrounds, moustaches, hats, captions etc, (and just looks cool while it's processing your image with a factory full of gears) but I realized you could also do something similar to this with your own photo editing program if you don't have the code....

Open a photo and go the "Effects" button in your toolbar, it will give you a drop down menu for Filters". Your program may call it something else, my program is Microsoft Picture it. Experiment with different filters (this one is called Photocopy, but there are others that give you a more stylized, artsy outline) that take away the color leaving an outline for your kids to fill in and then print!

Trust me, this will keep them busy for a looong time, and little ones can put together their own version of a scrapbook. they were so excited to color themselves and I like this a lot more than buying coloring books or downloading free printables of licensed characters, what say you? :) Super cute to give the grandparents, too!

Okay, off to try to finish the card I hinted at, inspired by a project I saw in Family Fun it involves my scanner (any guesses?)