Continuing with the card-making process, I began by trying to understand why, when printing through iPhoto on the computer, pictures were being cropped in a frustratingly restrictive way. In many instances this did not matter much, but when it came to a butterfly having its wings clipped this was intolerable. So I got up this morning determined to crack the problem.
Essentially what was happening was that the iPhoto customising facility offered specific frame sizes and sliced the pictures to fit. It is a while since I used my Canon Pro900 printer to any great degree, but I seemed to remember this not being the case with that piece of equipment in the past. So what was happening?
It occurred to me that I was not seeing the usual box on the screen showing alternatives that come with the printer. This offered me much more flexibility. iPhoto must therefore be overriding it. It is, of course possible that I have not fully understood the capabilities of the Mac. Nevertheless, I had to find a way round this.
I thought I would work outside iPhoto. How could I do that? Then I had a brilliant idea. I would drag the pictures onto the desktop, open them up in preview, and print from there. And what do you know? It worked. This had the additional bonus of the printer’s options for producing multiple copies of the same photograph on one sheet of paper. Instead of having to find two different pictures that would conveniently fit together, I could now fit up to four samples of one image on the sheet. I was able to rescue the poor Peacock, and to offer unpruned Clematis.
I had not used the butterfly at all, because the clipping would have ruined it. The Clematis, however, had worked to some extent as a squarer image than the elongated one I had wanted. 
I was now able to use both.
Now, I am sure there are those of you out there who would have managed this in a much easier way, but please remember I am a septuagenarian, and when I was your age, before space travel brought the computer into its journey to the palms of your hands, we made do with film and chemicals. And time.
The swan taking off is an example of the inventive creativity my able assistant brings to her part in the process. 
Not having been able to decide the size of this print that would work, I produced two, one really rather too small. Jackie decided to place the smaller version inside the card to echo the larger image on the front. This also involved considerable trimming so that the whole concept made sense. Once having hit on this idea there was no stopping her. Bits snipped off pictures began to turn up in all sorts of places, inside, on the back, to the left, to the right, in the centre. Here a swan, there a swan, everywhere a swan. When writing my inscriptions on the back I even missed some.
Despite her antipathy towards photographic cards, believing that such artwork should be drawn or painted, Jackie was heard on occasion to punctuate her work with such phrases as; ‘I could buy that one’. It made me feel I must be doing something right.
We spent all day in the ‘factory’. Today’s tally of products placed in the plastic wallets was fifty three. That makes 153 in all. Jackie thought that should have sufficed, but I found some more photographic paper that just had to be used up. More were consequently printed. The tally will be recorded tomorrow. .
Jackie still cooked a delicious hot arabbiata which I enjoyed with Lusac St Emilion 2011, and she with her customary Hoegaarden. Before this I learned what it is like to water 83 pots so full of flowers that you cannot see the containers. I just helped. I didn’t fill the whole eighty three.