Kids Artwork: A DIY Father's Day Present

Husband is not a fan of the made-up holidays. I on the other hand, want to celebrate everything. Because as the years pass and I see our three children growing up, I have a tendency to want to cling and hold on a little tighter.

This year I wanted to create a very special heartfelt Father's Day present. Husband loves to see our family photos and the kids' artwork displayed in our house. I feel the same way, why invest in pricey art when we have our own budding artists right in our house!

Our kids, like yours I'm sure, bring home a ton of artwork from school. I tried several ways to keep it all (in plastic bins, displayed in cheap garage sale frames and just plain taped to the wall as seen in these photos.)

I even tried to get fancy and use iPhone apps to archive all that creativity to one day turn into a book. But that was just like scrapbooking, and I never did that well either.

Then I picked up the book Playful Home and was inspired by this photograph and the framed art in a child's room:

How cool. A retrospective of three kids artwork, beautifully designed and framed. As usual, I wanted to make a similar version to that one, and still not spend a lot of money.

I started by taking pics of their drawings, paintings and projects from this school year. Then I cropped the photos to be approximately the same size. I created a similar design as in the inspirational photo in Adobe InDesign and inserted the photos and wrote my own text. (If you don't do graphic design work like I do and don't have this software, I was thinking that you could create something similar in Pic Monkey, which is free.)

I debated whether to print from my own printer, but I didn't want to do any cutting and gluing, I wanted it to look professional, as if you could have bought this somewhere. So I turned my design into a *jpeg file took it to Walgreens to have them print a 14x20 poster size (which was the size of an old frame I had.) With an in-store coupon, I saved a nice chunk of change.

*I had to specify the type of file because FYI, their photo machines cannot read PDFs.

I might do this every year and put them side by side along one wall to make a nice wall gallery!

Now mind you, I hung this up in the laundry room just to photograph it because that room had the best light. But Husband has yet to see this since Father's Day is still thirteen days away, on June 16th. So shhh...I'm taking it down now and hiding it in a closet.

Hopefully I've inspired you to think of a new way to preserve your kids' artwork and maybe to make a beautiful DIY Father's Day gift.