Storing the kids’ artwork thanks to Shutterfly

Storing our kids’ schoolwork is incredibly problematic in our house. Basically, it’s coming out of our eyeballs. However, some of that art work made for an awesome Christmas gift this year for my in-laws.

My kids are creating some pretty cute artwork. While some of them are hung up on our magnet wall or our fridge, most of it will end up filed away in their memories boxes. Only a child’s mother can think that their child’s drawing of an apple is adorable.

Only a child’s mother and that child’s grandparents.

I used Shutterfly to put together a hardbound 9″ x 9″ coffee table book for my in-laws of some of the girl’s work from this year.

To start, I picked out all the artwork I liked and separated it by girl. In order to make it easy for my in-laws to identify what pictures belonged to which girl, I knew I wanted to have their work take up an entire page at a time. I then hung up the work on a solid color wall in our house. I used clear tape and carefully, lightly taped it to the wall. The trick was to make sure that the corners didn’t fold over because that would create shadows. While it was impossible to make sure that walls were cropped out, I was fine with the solid color wall showing, as long as there weren’t any shadows.

I set my camera up on a tripod in our living room and shot each piece of work. It did take quite a while. In the end, some the photos were too light, which I couldn’t tell on my viewfinder. However it worked out because I had so many pictures, I had to cut some down anyway.

Once they were all photographed, I uploaded them to Shutterfly and used the in-software tools to edit, crop, resize and lay them out on all the pages. The front cover displays a few piece of work and the back is a picture of my daughters together. I also allowed for a page each for a biography. This book was capturing them as they were this last year, so I wanted to write a bit too. Thankfully, Shutterfly had a great theme for kid art and all I had to do was drag and drop and fill in some text.

The entire process was so easy and the finished product was great quality. And my in-laws loved it. So really, it was a win-win.