Missin' you on the 4th...

Whenever we have a gathering for the extended family I like to pull together something for everyone to work on to send to our missionaries.  We have Matt who is serving in the Washington Seattle Mission, Alex Nicole who is serving in the Bolivia Santa Cruz Mission, and B.J. who will take off for the Washington Vancouver Mission in August.  I try to keep things simple and inexpensive. Here's what I came up with for or 4th of July family Bash:

I already had some butcher paper so I cut a strip for each missionary making each a little narrower than a regular envelope and had my daughter Bekah decorate them.  I taped them to one of the sliding doors and set out a school box full of red and blue markers and colored pencils.  That's it! Pretty easy.  I just walked around a bit taking candid photos for a photo collage and occasionally reminded family members to write to the missionaries before leaving.

What do missionaries like as much as letters?...maybe MORE?  Photos!  With Alex serving in Bolivia I've been wracking my brain to figure out how to cut some of the weight from the care packages I send.  Usually I send actual photos but this time I decided to try my hand at making a photo collage of our 4th of July festivities.  I really like how it turned out and Alex and Matt won't have to worry about carrying photos around their whole mission and can even just stick them in their journals if they like.  Each page prints to an 8.5" x 11" paper.

That's my family!...well, part of them anyway.

Aren't they fun!

Photoshop makes putting together a collage super easy.  I thought it might be a good idea to label each photo...Matt's been gone a whole year and the young ones tend to change quickly.  You could do the same thing in other programs but it's going to create a pretty huge file and will take f-o-r-e-v-e-r to print.  Make a pdf of your collage and print the pdf copy.  Your collage will look the same but it will be a much smaller file. You could also print these using the 'double sided' option on your printer.

To mail I just folded up each strip and put it and the photo collage's in a regular envelope.  I did have to take it to the post office to be weighed but it was a fraction of what it cost's to send a package to Bolivia.  Every little penny counts, right?

Want MORE creative letter writing ideas?

check out here, here, here, and here.