The World According To Me

Even before Ryker started school the amount of artwork...coloring...crafty things was adding up!...And I just didn't know what to do with it all.  I bought these storage boxes from Ikea so that at least I had somewhere to keep it all, but once school started Ryker was bringing home paintings by the armful and the box quickly started overflowing.  

All year I collected and collected...not being able to through any of it away...hehe!  I was using paintings as wrapping paper, Ryker created his own little art gallery behind the door in his room (which has spread down the wall), we have taped pictures to the fridge and even other areas...but there was just too much of it and I knew that before anything went in the garbage I wanted to do something special with it.  

Finally I found my answer!!!

I have always LOVED paislee press...and Liz's style (her work is gorgeous!), so when she shared this book that she made I knew that's what I was going to do.

I chose to take pictures of all his artwork (I included church and school), combined it with pictures of his creations I had taken throughout the year and added pictures from the disk of pictures his class gave us at the end of the year of different activities from school to compile his art book.

I then threw away the pile of artwork I had saved all year...YES...that's right I threw it away (okay...I kept a couple of favourite pieces that I really love, but it's probably under 10 items!) and it felt so good to get that all cleaned up and organized.  There is NO WAY that we needed 14 of those big boxes (one for each year of his school from preschool all the way up to grade 12) and then times that by 2 since I have 2 children....  Where would I even put something like that???  This way I can still remember all these perfect little creations without the mess!

It took many hours (2 hours just to take all the pictures!!!), but 100 pages later and we now have this collection of Ryker's artwork!  

It is a true keepsake.  I can't even begin to describe how much I love it!  I have always had a special love for children's art...I love they way they see the world around them and how they express that through art.  There are no rules to children's art and their imagination is unique.  They aren't afraid to make mistakes or add colors that aren't technically correct.  I just love it!

The book is created through Shutterfly so it's easy to just upload your pictures (I did not edit my pictures to make them all pretty...I just cropped them after uploading to make them fit the space I put them in (adjusted the size that way...make sense??).  I needed to keep it as quick and simple as I could and then I added any information to different pages.  I tried to keep that simple as well.  A lot of the artwork from school was written on with information that Ryker had given them while he was creating the piece, so there wasn't always a need for a big write up or explanation.  I also tried to choose layouts that would hold a lot of pictures...I tried to cut down the number of pages in the book to keep the cost down.  You can always find sales, but even with a sale the book still cost me quite a bit. 

On the last page I included a picture of Ryker on his last day of school with a write up about him.

Done!

I thought I had taken a picture of the back cover...it's sooooo cute!!  There's a picture of Ryker wearing one of his many headbands he created.  I guess I forgot that one.  Oops!

K :)