Children’s artwork. I’m sure I’m not alone with this problem, but I have piles of it. Every day, Miss 3 produces pages of beautiful drawings and paintings. For the past year, I’ve been pegging them to some string hung across the living room wall. Nice in theory, but in reality it just looks like a big mess.
This year, I decided to make a collage with our favourite drawings, that we could frame and mount on the wall. I was so thrilled with the results, I thought I’d share with other North Shore Mums. It only took a few hours to do, was pretty cheap, and looks (in my biased opinion) fantastic! Here’s how to do it:
STEP ONE: EDIT
Go through the piles of drawings and choose to your favourite 20 – 30 pictures. It’s much harder than it sounds!
STEP TWO: SCAN
Scan your chosen images. We’ve got an HP Photosmart 5520 which retails for around $129. It prints, it scans, it copies, it does everything! My long-term plan is to scan all her drawings in (and ditch the paper), so it’s a handy tool to have at home.
STEP THREE: ROTATE & RESIZE
Your images may scan at the wrong orientation, so use Photoshop or an online editing program to rotate the image to the correct orientation. You may also want to resize the image so it uploads faster. I resized mine to 1000 pixels x 707 pixels, so each file was approx. 200-250kb (still a good resolution, but much much smaller file size).
STEP FOUR: UPLOAD
I used Snapfish to create my Collage Poster. I chose a 40 x 50 cm poster, which is priced at $25.95. However, I receive the promotional emails from Snapfish, so used a discount code to get it for 40% off and free delivery. The total printing and delivery was $16. It’s well worth signing up to the emails when you register, as they regularly send out great offers.
Creating the collage is really straightforward, and you’re given a few options in terms of size (I chose 40 x 50 cm), orientation (I went portrait) and whether or not to have a title. You can also choose from 44 background colours and other options like what images to feature and spacing.
When you’re happy with everything, order and await delivery!
STEP FIVE: PURCHASE FRAME
I originally planned to go to Ikea, because I’d done a bit of online research and thought the Ribba Frame for $24.99 would be ideal. However, when I was in Target at Westfield Hornsby, they had a sale with 40% off all their photo frames! A beautiful, high-quality white mounted frame for $59.99 was reduced to $36. So I decided to spend the extra $10 and save myself the petrol and hassle of getting to Rhodes with two kids in tow!
STEP SIX: FRAME THE POSTER AND MOUNT
Delivery with Snapfish is quoted as 1-7 days. Mine arrived in four days. I ordered on the Monday afternoon and received it on Friday morning. I purchased the frame the day after ordering the poster, so it was ready and waiting to be filled when the poster arrived. Before my daughter had chance to put her grubby fingers on it, I put it straight into the frame and onto the wall. Voila! I was thrilled with the results. Miss 3 was transfixed too, and sat in front of it for about 15 minutes admiring her work.
So for $52 and about three hours work, I’m pretty pleased with the results! Now, I just need to work out what to do with the piles of other drawings in the house…