This year I decided to embark on a Calendar Project. A What? Every month for the whole year I will do a photo shoot with my girls using each month as a theme guide and at the end of a 12 month period I will have 12 beautiful photos for a calendar to give as a gift at Christmas.
I love this idea for several reasons. The first is that I will get a chance to document how the girls change and grow over a 12 month period. The second is that I will not be hustling at Christmas time to find 12 good pictures to put a Calendar together.
This project came about because for the past two or three years I keep saying that I will put together a calendar and give it to the grandparents. But then Christmas gets here and with all the hustle and bustle, and parties, and holiday cooking, and everything else I never find the time to sort through the photos I have taken and find ones I like for each month. Okay maybe I am being particular and could just grab any old photos, but that wasn't what I had imagined when giving a calendar, so I decided that just wouldn't work.
The other part of it, is that I have spent the past few years working on taking better photos, my new camera has really made a difference in the quality my pictures, and I wanted to be able to display them in a beautiful Calendar.
I love all the different Calendar options that Shutterfly has available, especially the easel calendars and will probably get several different styles for Christmas presents. This past Christmas I bought some beautiful Christmas cards, magnets, prints, and a mouse pad and loved them all. They made some really heart warming gifts and I loved all the different products available to put photographs on.
For January I wanted to do something in the spirit of the New Year, so we went with what else but gold balloons! And lots of them! I think my husband thought I had lost my mind. For the photo shoot Ava is wearing one of my very favorite dresses: the Winter Wonderland Sweater Dress that I made for Project Run and Play sew along several seasons ago. I loved pulling out this sweet dress and letting it shine again, since sooner or later even Ava will be too big to wear it. Sniff.
It was warm that day so we took a few photos outside, but took the majority inside using my backdrop stand, seamless white paper, and my brand new studio lights (yay!) Since I had carpet in my living room, I laid down a board under the paper to make it a firm surface.
I already have February'sphoto shoot planned out in my mind and can't wait to see how it comes together!
What do you think?