Days out diary - child friendly and family activities

Family days out Lake district cruise on Lake Windermere Family days out childrens farm Family days out UK holidays Family days out Wookey Hole Cave Family days out Thomas land and children railways Family days out camping holidays with young children Family days out zoos

This years Christmas craft picture is a large Christmas Tree and Snowman.

Christmas craft picture - Tree and Snowman

This giant craft picture is the first we've made since I mounted a dedicated craft board to the wall. The board is a piece of MDF that I got had the local B&Q to cut to size. The board is much better than mounting direct to the wall as I did before. As well as providing a defined area to shape the picture into it is far easier to staple to than straight into wall and doesn't leave holes in the plasterboard when the picture is removed.

Most of the things in the picture I've already explained in earlier posts about my giant craft pictures with the children.

The new thing that I tried this time was to include pictures of our family on baubles hanging from the tree. These were created using free open source software Libre Office and GIMP.

Create your own family photo baubles

Download the following Libre Office Draw file:

Open your photo using GIMP (or another photo editor) and create a circle around the photo using the Elipse select tool. Using the shift key will create a circle rather than an oval. Use crop image to selection and save as a .png file. You may also want to turn some feather on to give it a smooth edge. GIMP screenshot using elipse select tool

 

Insert the file into Libre Office.

Libre Office screenshot - insert image

 

Shrink to the correct file to fit inside the bauble.

Libre Office screenshot - Christmas bauble image

 

In this case I stapled these direct to the wall, but you could instead create baubles for a Christmas tree by gluing two baubles together back to back.

I created the baubles on a linux computer, but all the software I used is also available for free on Windows as well. Download from Libre Office website and GIMP website.