Quite often I have the urge to make handmade gifts. Much of the time, my urge doesn’t actually align with my available time and I default to buying gifts. For Mother’s Day this year (yes, this post is late) I collaborated with my sister to make a photo collage that spells “Mother”. While you can go online and order frames that spell anything you want, I had two problems with this. The first problem is that the frames tend to be quite large and the second is that you can’t upload your own photos to use. The big draw to making this gift was using photos from the cities where my sister and I live.

After we both went out and took a slew of  photos, I processed them to be black and white and cropped them to be 3.5″x5″ so that I could buy a smaller frame that would fit better in our Mom’s house. The photos were printed as 4 x 6 prints that I cut down to size with my swing arm paper cutter. I found a frame at Michaels that would fit the photos and had a piece of mat cut to fit inside the frame. I used photo corners to mount the photos. I had to carefully measure and draw light pencil lines on the mat in order to properly align the photos. After mounting the photo corners, I erased all of my lines.

The finished product, now in Mom’s hands:

Photo key:

1.  My sister and her fiance making the letter M in Anchorage
2. A work of art in the sidewalk on 2nd street in Austin
3. My husband and I forming the letter T in Austin
4. A sculpture / bench downtown Austin
5. The letter E from a light up sign in Anchorage
6. The side of a bench in Austin