Book of School Projects
Sunday, July 10, 2011 at 3:27PM 
My husband's an artist, so a couple of years ago I decided to put together a little book with pictures of his artwork. Our three year old saw it a few months ago and said "Where's mine?" Hmmm... that's right you're a little artist too. Throughout the year he had been bringing home lots of projects from school. They would hang on the fridge until the next pieces would come in. The older pieces would move to a pile in the cabinet. He's only 3, and he was bringing at least one piece a day. We have years of this ahead of us. I can't possibly keep every piece of paper he touches so I decided to take his advise and do a book for him. I scanned some pieces and took pictures of others. I kept the format simple, white background in all pages, showing one piece per page. The beginning of the book shows a picture of him at school and some of his classmates with their names. At the end I have his graduation picture with his teachers and a scan of the ribbon given to him that day.
The book was printed by Blurb, a service anyone can use. It turned out great and came pretty quick. I decided on the square format with the image wrap hardcover. It took a few hours to do all that scanning and photographs but now I have a neat archive of his artwork for the year. (I'm thinking I'll still hang on to a few originals though :))
Zig & Zag
Here are some additional pages of the book for those of you that wanted to see more. The page with the green background is the one where I left blank space. I cut out some original handprints, and glued them in there.
There are a few call outs in the book like "Valentine's Day," etc. I kept them simple, since it's all about his work, not mine.
I love to see the interest in the book. If you have a comment or question please go ahead and leave it here. Thanks!
Pre-school, blurb book, organization, school projects | in At Home, Books + Other Goods, Projects Tweet 
Reader Comments (21)
Absolutely love this. We just moved and had to sort through both of our kids' school projects. This is a great way to hold on to memories without all the clutter.
Love this! I have been wanting to make one for Gavin as well. I have huge piles of his projects and now school is about to start again..yikes! I've got to get busy doing this.
N The top 2 reasons that this is a splendid idea:
1) It's a wonderful way risked your child feel loved, special, & encouraged
2) Many of their 'pieces' simply won't stand the test of time - I'm 30, and although
my Momma faithfully saved every last scrap of color or word on paper, piece of
pottery, or other medium a child (or Momma) loves or considers 'art work,
many of those pieces look nothing like they did 30 years ago - color fades,
pages wrinkle & tear, & glue loses it's 'stick'
Yay! to the author of this article, as well as to all of those li'l artists out there!
@Nicole Thanks for the nice comment!
Can you please e-mail me at Lowry517@aol.com? I am wanting to know about how much your book cost you finished? And, how many pages did you do?? Thanks!
@Lacey I used the 7x7 square format. It's 40 pages and it cost me a total of $35 after shipping. Hope this helps!
I love this idea but have only one addition to consider. Scanning hand prints defeats the purpose of doing the hand print in the first place. Isn't it to record the size of the hand at that point in time? The artwork is fun but in the future it is comparing the hand size that is heart-warming. Just something to think about...
@citymouse Good point! I actually left space on a spread towards the back of the book and later glued 2 original handprints there. I've been thinking about adding some more sample pages of the book to this post. Maybe that should be one of them? Also, the piece shown above happen's to be one of the ones I kept the original copy of. Thanks for the input!
I'd love to see more pages from your book!! Did you design the front cover yourself? Do you happen to remember the fonts you used? Love it!
@Lori K Thanks! I did design the cover. The letters were hand drawn using a Sharpie. I'll try and upload more of the pages by the end of next week.
I absolutely love your idea! Making a book with the projects is a great way to keep them using less space (i'm already considering a portrait format with two pisces of art per page) but what I really adore is the pictures you included - specially of his friends with their names. I need to do this too! My daughter is 3 years old and I'm already looking for ways to save her art work without taking a lot of space at home. thanks!
I love, Love, LOVE this idea!!!!!!! It's on my to-do list this week to clean out all of my son's papers and projects from 3 years of preschool, and I'm soooooo glad I found your idea before I threw any of them away. I'm definitely making books like yours!!!!! I really like how you did the cover. Could you tell me more specifically how you made it???? I looked on blurb and couldn't find any covers like it. Oh, by the way, I recently had 3 INCREDIBLE items made from my son's baby clothes, too. Let me know if you want to see pics--I'll cherish the quilt, Christmas pillow, and tooth fairy pillow forever! Thanks for this post/pin and your terrific blog, too! :-) Deana
Thank you for the idea. I had a mountainous stack of papers from my son's kindergarten year that I could not part with until now. Now I just need to put my book together!!
I love this idea! what font did you use for the title of the book?
Such a great idea. Did you use the "hardcover, dust jacket" or "hardcover, ImageWrap" for this book? Did you create your cover and then scan it into PS? What were your steps to create the cover? Thanks!
Any advice on what scanner you used? I'd like to create one of these but don't have a scanner (that works) anymore. :(
Hi! Amazing Idea!! And gorgeous results!! Any chance of a tutorial on the cover design? Did you create the cover by hand first, then scan it on and use it as the cover for the book? Details Please!! I cant seem to get mine to work like yours has. Love it!
@Rosa: Thank you! The letters on the cover were actually drawn by hand, and then scanned in.
@Jessi and @ Aymee: Thanks! I used the hardcover - Image wrap. I first found fonts similar to what I wanted and created a basic layout in Illustrator. Printed it out and traced over, and modified as needed. I wanted to have a hand drawn look, yet still keep good letterform proportions. I scanned in all the pieces for the cover and brought them into Photoshop, where I put them all back together and played with the colors. Hope that helps. I'm also putting a typography class for www.hellocreatividad.com that I'm super excited about. A step by step tutorial on this cover will be part of it, among many other typography related fun. (oh and it will be in English)
@Rebecca: I have an old Epson scanner/printer combo that I got for free with the purchase of a computer about 12 years ago. The printer doesn't even work on it. If I was to buy a new scanner I would get a simple flatbed Epson. I would stay away from the big multi-function ones.