Presents with Forethought

I know, I know, it’s October and we’re talking Christmas. It’s a big no-no and we want to enjoy fall, Halloween and Thanksgiving as much as anyone. But here’s why we’re bringing it up now. Invariably, every year people come to up with ideas for custom gifts they’d like to give someone, but they come talk to us in December. What tax season is for accountants, Christmas is for custom framers and we’re always swamped with orders. But we absolutely hate the idea of someone not being able to give the gift they dreamed of just because they weren’t thinking 3 months ahead. Plus, if you get your order in early, we’ve got a little something special for you! Without further ado, here are some of our favorite gift ideas that really show your forethought:

Family Photos

A great family portrait is like freezing a piece of your wedding cake, only way better. If you actually did freeze any of your wedding cake, you know that you were looking forward to reliving that magical day again. But what you actually got was probably a stale, slightly salmon-tasting memory trigger. Then it was gone. A family portrait, on the other hand, takes your family at a certain point in time and freezes them so you can look back at it over and over, remembering the kids when they were in kindergarten or that beautiful fall foliage before you moved to Florida. And they almost never taste like salmon. If you’re looking for some tips on getting a family portrait done, you can check out our interview with Solid Rock here, and if you want to turn a portrait into a great present, bring it into the shop and let us frame it up right.

Retouch an Old Photograph

Chances are that at your house, your parents’ house or maybe your grandparents’ house are some great old pictures. Maybe grandpa before he shipped out or your mom as the local dairy princess, but chances also are that those pictures are tiny and a little (or maybe a lot) beat up. Bring them in and let us see what we can do. We work with several different specialists who take just those kinds of memories, repair them, blow them up and get them looking great for larger prints. You can read more about the process here. But we know (because we’ve done it) that your mom would love that picture of her parents on their wedding day touched up, blown up, and beautifully framed in the den.

Create a Shadow Box

This is another one of our favorites. Everyone has things they’ve saved over the years that mean a lot to them. Often it’s keepsakes from the kids, but it can also be movie tickets from a first date, letters from a soldier or fishing lures with a special memory. Usually these are thrown in a cigar box somewhere and looked at when it’s time to clean out the underwear drawer. But we have a better place for them. We love to create beautiful, meaningful shadow boxes out of these keepsakes. In fact, we wrote up a three part story about how we created one of these for a special client,  but the short version is that you bring in what someone finds so special and we’ll help come up with a design to not only show it all off, but to protect them for a lifetime and make a piece of art in the process.

There are lots of other things we’ve done in the past to create the perfect present, but these are a few of our favorites. But one thing they all have in common is that they’re all time consuming to create. They aren’t something that we can do if you bring us everything on December 18th. In fact, some years we’re so booked up that we can’t do them if you bring them to us on November 18th. So take a few minutes to think about a special gift for some of the most special people in your life. And if you come to us for help early, we have a little something for you. Order before November 1st and bring in this coupon and we’ll give you a free UV glass upgrade for helping us not be quite so busy over the holiday season. The UV glass will ensure that whatever is behind it doesn’t suffer from the degradation of the sun’s rays. In addition, we’ll get started on your project right away, but let you break up the payments over several months so it’s not quite so hard to swallow.

This is what we do, and we love it. Let us do it for you.