This year's coloring book idea was actually inspired by the Crayola's Lights, Camera, Color which allows you to upload photos from your computer and turn them into coloring pages. Their system is really good actually. It's super easy to upload your photos and it turns them into coloring pages in less than a second. They also have lots of fun things you can add to your photos like cartoon word bubbles and fake mustaches.

You can play around with this on the Crayola site for free, but if you want to print your coloring pages you need a code that you will find inside the lid of Crayola boxes that are marked LIghts Camera Color. I think they are on the current 64 crayon boxes and definitely worth the small investment in a new box of crayons.

The only problem with the coloring page maker is that not all pictures have good enough contrast to come out well as a coloring page. This is not a fault of the Crayola system. I actually did mine manually using photoshop and after hours of trying to figure out what filter might improve the images, just gave up and traced the outlines by hand on any areas that didn't come out well. Sometimes it's time to step away from the computer and do it the old fashioned way. I was able to trace all the photos very quickly and then I photocopied the touched up print outs. I think they came out looking great.

One of the reasons I like doing these photo gifts each year is it forces me to go through all of our pictures and pick out the best ones and do something with them. I spent one morning sorting pictures and then spent about 5 hours yesterday making the coloring books. (But that includes my learning curve. You could probably do this in a few hours now that you know the trick.)

To go with the coloring books we are also making some home made crayons from our huge collection of broken crayons. You can find directions for making recycled crayons here. We're giving these to the teachers at school as a Thank You gift and to relatives and some friends. I think they would make great party favors also.

I know this is a very last minute post and you may not have time to do this this year, but I always do my gifts last minute (I plan them early but make them late) and so that means I often don't share them here. This year I wanted to share it anyway. Hopefully you will find it useful even if only to play with on the Crayola site. Kids will have fun playing around making coloring pages and then they can print them out and color, a great indoor activity for a cold winter day.

Now I guess we'll find out if any of my family members are really reading Mommy Poppins. If so I just ruined Christmas. Oops. Now I'm off to tell my kids there's no such thing as Santa Claus.