Twelve years ago, my friend Heidi and I went out to lunch. As the first one to arrive at our table, I sent her the obligatory "I'm here!" text along with a photo of our table for two.
A few days later, she turned that tabletop photo into a custom thank-you card.
Then I took a photo of her card, tweaked and twisted it a bit, and sent that new image back to her.
She printed out a hard copy, framed it, took a photo of the framed image, and send me the photo.
And so it's gone for over a decade now that we have bounced this ever more complicated and constantly evolving image back and forth to each other. At times, we've fired it off rapid fire, multiple times in a single evening. Other times - and I take responsibility for this - the image has rested peacefully for up to a year before launching again.
All in all, this game has been great fun and I'm happy to say that over the Easter weekend, we were at it again.
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^ Heidi sent me this card for Easter 2022; deep inside those black and white checkers squares are the layers upon layers of images we've built, one upon the other, over the years.My task was to take this flower and flip into something new for this year's Easter greeting to my friend. First off, I had to shuffle through a few piles of paperwork to find the card again, which was a neat challenge all its own, and then I got to work
1) Without any sort of plan in mind, I began by copying the face of Heidi's card, both in color and black and white, in various sizes onto both regular printer paper and white cardstock. When I had four or five different options, I spread them across my desk, and pondered.
2) My brain connected the six flower petals with the six letters in the word, "Easter," and an idea was born. Why not use one of the larger cardstock reproductions of Heidi's card to cut letters from the flower petals and fashion a garland proclaiming "Happy Easter"?
3) As I happily trimmed out the letters, I realized I did not have enough checkered yardage to spell out "Happy," which was a fairly essential part of the message Sure, I could have used the checkered petals from one of my other copies of the card, but I preferred the challenge of just sticking with the one. I'd noticed that the background of the image that I was using had somehow picked up a peachy pink coloration in the printing process, and I decided that blush-colored part of the page would serve well for the word, "Happy."
4) As I snipped the letters and slid them into place on my desk, another image jumped in my mind. Rather than stringing the letters on one piece of cord, I saw the image of two layered gold necklaces, where one word - "Happy" - would hang from one cord above the other word - "Easter" - just as a trendy lady or, you know, a blinged out baseballer - would wear multiple gold necklaces of varying length. I dove into my stash of various cords and strings, as one does, and pulled out a flashy gold cord that could quite possibly stand in for 24 karat.
^ Ta daaa! Finished.
Now all that was left to do was to wrap up my little creation, and deliver it to my dear friend.
And Heidi, gracious friend that she is, soon sent me back this photo of my Happy Easter banner hanging in her very own kitchen window.
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Ah, sweet success.
So now, dare I say, Heidi, it's your move!
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P.S. Since our collaborative project was waiting for my next move, Heidi found other inspiration for her Easter greeting to me. And while it may not be based on a twelve-year bounty of back-and-forth creativity, her gift is every bit as sweetly successful as mine.
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Here are all the details of how our project has evolved.
Start at the top of this list for a chronological report:
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