Next week Team Picnik is giving away a couple one-year Picnik Premium Memberships in a new Twitter contest: Use Picnik to Tweet your favorite summer photograph, using the hashtag #SummerPicnik so we can see you, and Team Picnik members will choose the best ones, with winners announced on Friday, June 19!

Directions: Make a Twitter account, if you don’t have one! Announce yourself by following @picnik on Twitter! Take your picture, then upload it and edit it! Then find the Twitter page under the Save & Share tab to Tweet your summery masterpiece!

The contest runs from Monday at 12.01 am through Thursday at 2 pm PDT. So why are we telling you this early? Because it’s a beautiful weekend in June! So get outside and get those photos!

Note to our Southern Hemisphere Picnikers: You are entirely welcome to include your photos of the grumpy weather you’re having right now.

Update: The contest is now open! Feel free to start Tweeting your submissions!

Update #2: The contest is now closed! Thank you to everyone who participated! We will announce the winners tomorrow, June 19 at 2pm PDT. In the meantime, check out the submissions on Twitter by searching for “#SummerPicnik”.

Saturday, May 2, is National Scrapbooking Day. For you expressive souls who need more than what a drafting table, cutting board, soldering iron, 14 pair of specialty scissors, a compartmented box full of die-cut letters, flowers, leaves, hearts, teddy bears and kittens, glue and buttons can offer, allow us to offer a way to augment your craft: Picnik!

Just about everything on Picnik can be used towards digital scrapbooking greatness. The internet is full of handy free patterns and textures to use as new papers to layer with, and why limit yourself to your box full of die-cut shapes when there’s our huge collection of Stickers? We’ve got tons of fonts to put your memories into words, and for an extra head start there are all our collections of Fancy Collages, organized by theme. There are oodles of things on Picnik that even we haven’t tried yet, and National Scrapbooking Day is a great time for trying something new! And with our easy integrations on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and all sorts of other photo sharing and social networking sites, it can be like attending a scrapbooking party on National Scrapbooking Day, as well!

For inspiration, our own Brenda Anderson, Community Liaison in Charge of Flickr Operations, in had a Scrapbooking contest on the Flickr Picnikers group for the month of March, and to help celebrate all the possibilities of this craftiest of holidays, our friends at Blisstree are having a National Scrapbooking Day Giveaway: two free year-long Picnik Premium subscriptions, just for suggesting to her (and us) some clever feature ideas.

Celebrate our little blue planet today with our brand new ecologically awesome Earth Day Stickers!

Besides the leafy branches, earth, and recycling sign you see before you, we’ve got green housing, green energy, green architecture and green transport Stickers to choose from too. So enjoy making your environmentally sustainable, paper-free greetings today, and we all wish everyone a happy and natural Earth Day!

It’s that time of year again, simultaneously the beginning of the guacamole season and the official end of the holidays: the Sunday when all Americans gather together for buffalo wings, nachos, and FedEx ads.

The championship game of the sport Americans peculiarly refer to as “football” (when in reality it’s closer to rugby), about a hundred million people watch the “Big Game” every year, which even if it isn’t as many visits Picnik gets in a year, is still a lot of gridiron fans. So as a service to all you hundred million devotees of the game, we have a brand new collection of Shapes for you to adorn your Sunday parties with: helmets, jerseys and, of course beer.

We would also like to announce the other big release today for Premium Picnikers: Gritty! Sort of like Orton-ish’s worst enemy, Gritty is designed to make you look real, tough, legit, right there, stepped up, and not taking nuthin from nobody. Like, don’t mess with me, I’m Gritty.

We’re seeing pink here at Picnik! A hand-picked collection of Valentine’s Day Shapes, Stamps, Kisses and Candy is up! Plus two sets of over 20 brand new Valentines Day Fancy Collages! Now, we appreciate getting a Snoopy Valentine from a box of 36 as much as the next person, but go beyond grade 3 with Picnik’s power of personalization! Plus, they go great with a box of chocolates!

Happy New Year, Picnikers! Now that it’s about 2pm on the Pacific Coast, most of you should have recovered from last night’s revelries and be ready to start Picniking all those photos you took. Well, let us help make even the tamest soirée look like your own private Times Square (even if Ryan Seacrest couldn’t make it) with our new New Years shapes!

Rápidamente se llena nuestro mapa del mundo con inscripciones para el concurso del diciembre para los picnikeros. Puedes ganar un año gratis o tres meses gratis por quedar en primero lugar o segundo lugar respectivamente. La fecha límite es el 5 de enero y se nos está acercando rápidamente. ¡Todavía no hay ni una inscripción del mundo hispanohablante! Las tenemos de Norteamérica, de Europa, de Asia y hasta de las Antípodas. ¡Apúranse la península ibérica y el resto de las Américas! Queremos ver dónde celebran las fiestas en este año. El tema es “Las fiestas alrededor del mundo” y queremos ver los monumentos famosos locales con unas decoraciones de las fiestas.

View Larger Map

Animamos a los usuarios a hacer este concurso para saber dónde están todos los usuarios. Crea una cuenta de Flickr, te une al grupo de Picnikeros de Flickr y toma parte en el concurso. ¡Disfruta!

Our friends at Flickr have a timely reminder that it’s not too late to send holiday cards this year!

Especially those of you who, like us, are stuck in the snow-bound Pacific Northwest region and haven’t been able to find their cars let alone go downtown for last-minute shopping (even if the roads were open, which they’re not), using Picnik to “holiday-up” your own photographs to send to family and friends (see the Flickr examples above) is quick, easy, guaranteed on time, and requires absolutely zero winter driving skills.

An excellent place to start is in our new Premium collection of Fancy Collages from the talented people at Plain Digital Wrapper. And don’t forget to light a menorah candle and spin a dreidel with our new Hanukkah shapes!

the Picnik kids play in the Seattle snow

And lastly, do Santa a favor in all this wintery weather and help lighten his load with Picnik Premium stocking stuffers for everyone on your list! Just $24.95, it’s the gift that keeps on giving photo editing joy all year long.

Picnik’s gift generator has gotten a massage to make it even easier to give your favorite someone the gift of Premium awesomeness for a whole year! Perfect for everyone on your list, click here and you’re guaranteed to have your gift code before Christmas! In fact, you’re guaranteed to have your gift code before you can say “Well that was easy!” Either email the happy news to your happy recipient, or print out a custom card for a little extra physicality.

For just $24.95, the gift of photo-editing awesomeness to your friends, family, teachers, in-laws, and secret crush gives them access to all of Picnik Premium’s features and content for a whole year. Not to mention, it’s light on packing materials!

Brenda, our Community Liaison in Charge of Flickr Operations and Antipodean Branch Office Manager, has announced the December Flickr Picnikers Contest topic: Holidays Around the World! This month is special because, as she says, the photos need to be of “recognizable or unique landmarks in your part of the world,” but with a Christmas twist! We want to see where you’ll be celebrating the holidays this year, either in reality or in spirit.

Plus, follow the instructions, and your photo will be featured on the map Brenda put together, and on the one below! As always, the winner will receive a whole free year Picnik Premium, and the two runners up free 3-month subscriptions of Picnik Premium.

View Larger Map

We want to encourage all our users to take part in this contest to really get a sense of where everyone is. So we’d like to encourage all our users who haven’t yet to create a Flickr account, join the Flickr Picnikers group, and take part in the contest!

Also, we’d like to congratulate the winners of last month’s contest, “Picnik Yourself”, with a two way tie for first place:

Goldscale’s “i live for that look”	konabluee’s “Watch the World Go By”

And in 2nd and 3rd place:

nahomie123’s “Day 23″	jennwyers’ “DSC05397″