Merry Christmas in February!!!

Last summer, 2011, my boyfriend spent a month in Italy for work. While he was there, he explained to me a couple times that he wanted to buy a picture for his home. Something big and decorative. By the time he finally made it home, though, he had never found what he was looking for.

Well I can be quite crafty when I put my little brain to it. So one day I kidnapped the SD card from his digital camera and took it home. I picked out a couple of pictures.

I chose this one because it was apparent to me he liked the sunset. It was so pretty to him that day that he had to take a picture. It must have been SO pretty in real life, in fact, that he actually said to himself "WOW I need to capture this." I mean, its no award-winning photo of a sunset or anything, but I bet it looked amazing.

I chose this photo because of all the tons and tons he took, this was the most perfectly balanced. He's got a good 3-way weight...the sky, the buildings, and the ground/river (which is perfectly divided). Its got the perfect leading lines that draw your eye all the way to the center. And its really just got a nice array of colors that give it the Italy feel. I was genuinely quite impressed with this picture. This guy is no pro photog but geeze, this is a good snap!


So in comes my craftiness. I cropped the sunset from the first photo, pasted it behind the second photo, and did a little photoshop work to cheat my way to what I thought was a pretty cool picture. May I present:

For Christmas I put it in an envelope, wrapped it, put it in a box filled with tissue paper, and wrapped that. I told him it was his "big present". We saved it for last, and I'm pretty sure he was convinced there was nothing in that box. It weighed like... -3 lbs. He seemed happy, but we still had to get it enlarged, have him pick out the matte and frame, and actually get it all done. After all the steps in the process, and trying to find time together to get it taken care of, I finally picked it up from Hobby Lobby as a finished product last week. It looks absolutely fantastic!!!! So, Merry Christmas!!!!!!