Most clever Family gift, ever!

This was a Christmas gift from my son and daughter in law this last Christmas. Awesome!

Every year at Christmas our family gives loads of hand made, personalized gifts. Through the years the wonderful gifts of scrapbooks, family calendars, custom tee shirts, paintings, custom items and CDs of my sister's beautiful singing have been mind boggling. Yes, the ladies of the fam are a totally creative bunch!! One year my mom made afghans for everybody. That is dozens of afghans, dude.

The guys are clever too, but in a less crafty, more blue collar guy kind of way; as in rebuilding a truck engine, remodeling houses, welding and fabrication,motorcycle building, building an airplane, panning for gold, paving a highway, fine tuning a chain saw, building a custom computer and yes, two of them have mad skills with aircraft maintenance...one is in the Air Force and the other is a retired engineer from the Space Shuttle program.

So, back to the "Family" picture at the top. This last Christmas my daughter in law got the idea and my son, the mad computer genius, implemented her request and the whole fam got custom family pictures, totally unique to each person's identity.

Look closely. Look very very closely.....




Do you see what I see? Dozens and hundreds of tiny family portraits taken from our vast catalog of family photos. They must have worked with THOUSANDS when you consider that each portrait was skewed specifically to the recipient, with my mom and dad getting shots of their vintage wedding photos and their 50th wedding anniversary as well as all their kids and grand and great grandkids. My youngest daughter and her husband got shots of their wedding, their two dogs and their high school graduations. In fact, everybody's pet dogs and cats made it into the frames. We are a group of photo taking fanatics and we share our albums back and forth and hither and yon. Almost every shot we've taken over the years made it into these fantastic collages. Even the not so flattering photos were included. No two gifts were the same!



My parents' gift spelled out the word "Legacy." Every family's word was their last name. Each framed gift was unique and we spent a whole lot of time playing "spot the faces" that Christmas day.


I tell you what, if I can talk my son into writing this up in a tutorial, you can BET I'll be posting it here! It would be an awesome project for just about any occasion. In the meantime, we all agree that in the Christmas gifting category, my son and his wife win hands down. The rest of us are going to have to kick it up a notch to top this!

Thanks for stopping by. I'll be linking up to the blog parties on my sidebar, so come visit them with me. There are always LOADS of fun projects to be found. I've been offline since Monday, but now I'm back. Sorry I missed some of my favorite parties but now I'm off to link to my Thursaday favorites. Thanks!