Obsessive!

Every Christmas our family creates a calendar for the upcoming year. It features all the kids (the cousins/grandkids) on each page, and we give one to my grandmother and dad along with their other Christmas presents.

Well, this year, we have nine kids to include and it's my year to create the calendar. I started out by downloading a bunch of digi-scrapping papers. Don't laugh, but I do the layouts in Power Point. I have not yet mastered Paintshop Pro or Photoshop to the point that I have the control I have in Power Point. I opened a PPT document and created 12 slides. Then, I placed a picture of each kid on each page, making sure I had enough of each kid, and enough for each season. Next, I selected (most likely a temporary) scrapping paper for each page.

At about this point, I realized that I didn't have the flexibility I needed to cut pictures, rotate pictures, place good shadows, bevel, etc. the way I want. What did I do? I went out and spent $100 on Photoshop Elements 4.0.

I am now officially obsessed. The hours slipped away last night as I tried to learn my new program. I'm sticking with Power Point for the layout (too big of a learning curve to figure it all out during the holidays!), but I sure had fun messing with my pictures. It is amazingly easy to change the color of someone's shirt or add someone to a picture. I took a picture of A rock climbing and added S on the climbing wall right next to her. Not that I needed to do that. I was just test driving my new toy.

This was supposed to be my big writing weekend. Hubby was out of town and I had two whole nights to write away. Hopefully, I'll be able to control this new obsession and get some writing done this afternoon while Baby K naps.