I decided to take part in the Christmas Photocrafts contest run by Kodak and Britmums.  The challenge was to create gorgeous Christmas decorations, treasured keepsakes and memorable gifts using your printer. I love a challenge so I tried to think of a way I could use my printer to make a unique Christmas decoration.

I remembered a unique decoration that my son made when he was at nursery that I really treasure and bring out year after year. It’s a lovely holly wreath which is made out of his hand prints.

Look at the little hands, now he is eleven they are much bigger. The problem is that it is the only one I have, once it disintegrates that’s it, it has gone.  I then thought that this would be really easy to do with a printer. All you would need to do is to draw round your child’s hand in a black marker, scan it in and then print out loads. You could colour them on the computer or get your child to decorate them. You can then make the decoration and even better you can print a new one out each year. It’s a great way to preserve a memory.

The other thing I like to do for Christmas is to make personalised place mats for people so they know where they should sit at the dinner table. My son has great fun designing these and usually puts a photo of a special memory and a Christmas border round them as well as the persons name. If you use coloured paper these can look really festive. For example for my son I would use a photos of the different places we visited over the summer and make them into a collage with his name. These are a couple of the photos I would include these two from our trip to Belfast.

This one from our trip to Butlins

and this from our trip to Beamish

along with a nice photo of him. It is a nice way to remember the year while having Christmas dinner.

If you want to take part in the challenge have a look here:

http://www.britmumsblog.com/KodakPrinterProjects/2011/11/take-the-christmas-photocrafts-challenge-xmasphotocraft/