A big thank you to Mixbook for sponsoring this blog and for giving us the gift of Mixbook to share with our family and friends!

This year I wanted to make our holiday cards extra fun, and since we take so many pictures, I also wanted to begin a family tradition of printing a yearly photo book.  When I checked out the Mixbook website, I was excited to see all the amazing options they had to help bring my visions to life.  I was also impressed with how user friendly their website was.  You can insert your photos into their ready made templates, or you can customize your favorite template to your liking (i.e. photo size, placement, colors, fonts, etc).  For our Year In Review book, I upgraded to the Premium Lay Flat Hardcover so it would be more sturdy (a must with Ava and Aura).  Then, for our Christmas cards, I selected the Hand-Painted Christmas Portrait Luxe Board Flat Card.  As a photographer, having multiple surface options to print on is my favorite Mixbook feature.

I chose the 12"x12" Modern Year In Review book and filled it with our favorite family photos from this past year.  When our order arrived in the mail, we were all so excited to see our cards and book in person.  It was extremely special reminiscing on so many great family memories that occurred over this last year. Mixbook did such a great job and the quality is fantastic!  Their photo books also make amazing gifts for grandparents, parents, etc!

For our holiday cards, I figured what could be better than creating a photo that brought together something that I enjoy doing with Ava and Aura (baking) and the girls doing what they love most... making a mess! Haha.  I love sparking their imaginations, so I decided to do a simple composite of them as cookie-cutter sized girls making snow angels in flour, all while baking cookies!

I wanted to share how I created this fun photo: First, I took a photo of a few sugar cookies that we cut out on a cutting board.  I made sure to leave some room on the cutting board for where I was going to place my cookie-sized girls (in Photoshop).  Then, we dumped a couple bags of flour on our wood floor so I could get an individual photo of both my girls being "snow angels"... yep, you read it right! Lol.  It was a giant mess, but oh so worth it!  Ava and Aura loved every second of it and had way too much fun ;)

After I got a picture of each of them, my hubby and I let them play in the flour for a few minutes before we cleaned up.  I volunteered to do the much needed immediate bath duty.  My husband got the better end of the deal cleaning the floor, right??  Okay... maybe not ;). Haha!  Ava said making flour angels was so much fun and asked if we could do it again.  Haha!

Once I edited the three photos necessary to created my image, I combined them as layers in Photoshop.  I sized then placed my girls accordingly on the cutting board and used a light opacity eraser to smoothly blend the images together.   Afterward, I uploaded their photo on Mixbook to create our family Christmas card!  Ava and Aura are ecstatic about it!  Ava even brought one to her kindergarten class for show and tell.  She said the kids loved it!  I can't wait to send out all of our Mixbook Christmas cards. :)

Happy holidays and don't forget to check out all the amazing options Mixbook has to offer by clicking here. Xoxo

Ashley