Friday, June 27, 2014

Mom!! Grandma took away my Cleavage!!

Yes, I did.  I got a cute picture of my granddaughters, and one of the older ones was inadvertently (I'm hoping), showing a little more cleavage than Old Grandma thought necessary.  Ten minutes with Photoshop and things are good, at least from my perspective.  If I was a little better skilled with the program, it wouldn't have taken me that long, but who cares?  In the end, I did what a grandma needs to do.

As I was working, I thought about my own grandmother, Lill.  She was the original Photoshop Master, and she never went anywhere near a computer.  Her method of choice was Contact Paper.  Remember that stuff? That wonderful-but-cheesy sticky paper that you could use inside your kitchen cabinets and drawers, on tabletops, or wherever you needed a quick and cheap "makeover."  What a feeling of success when installation went smoothly, and whatever you were sticking it to was totally transformed... and what a feeling of exasperation if you weren't careful and the adhesive side stuck to something it wasn't meant to.

Grandma took Contact Paper a step further.  Sitting in her living room one afternoon, I saw a new picture of my cousin and her little boy hanging on the wall.  The background was lovely - daisies!  I remarked about what a nice picture it was, and she had me look at it closer.  The daisies were covering my cousin's ex-boyfriend!  Grandma had painstakingly cut out these flowers from Contact Paper and strategically placed them, and the result was actually good!  Looking closer at the other photos on the wall, I noticed another where the divorced spouse had been "flowered-over."  This phrase became a part of our family's legacy, as spouses were jokingly threatened with being flowered-over from that point on.

I kind of shudder when I think about what Grandma might have done with a computer and Photoshop.  Ex-husbands and wives would be gone from the family photos in a millisecond; that grandson with the long, shaggy hair would gotten a respectable haircut; eye makeup would have been toned down.

And I take comfort in the fact that none of *her* granddaughters would have sported any cleavage either.

1 comment:

  1. It's impressive that she was able to so carefully and accurately place the flowers. And very, very funny.

    I noticed on today's Geneabloggers post that today was the first day a newspaper published a photograph. As I searched for information about that one of the topics that came up in the search results was photo manipulation (as opposed to touch-ups). Even though the first photo in a newspaper was published in 1848, I'm sure your grandmother was the first to manipulate a photo by her method!

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