photobooks

Little Arty Hands are a new company setting out to help us preserve our children’s artwork with easy to create memoir books.

I’m sure most of us have the same situation where you just seem to accumulate piles and piles of kids creations whether drawings, paintings, junk modelled creations or whatever else! After a while it does get impossible to hang on to all of them, so I keep the best ones, try to take pictures of some of the others and then sneak the rest into the recycling pile when the children are not looking – although I have been busted on the odd occasion:

“Mum, you threw away my model!” “Oh no.. it must have ended up in there by mistake… :S” cue skeptical look and “I know it was you Mum”

Although we can’t keep everything I do like the kids to feel that their artwork is appreciated, after all they have put their time and effort into it, and feel proud of what they have done.

Many of the pictures I keep end up hiding at the bottom of the cupboard, although we do of course have the obligatory pictures stuck on the fridge like nearly all family homes!

I love the idea of the Little Arty Hands books to display the children’s work in a way that is easy to get out and enjoy, so I was very happy when they kindly let me have one to review. I collected together 30 of my boy’s pieces of artwork – a mixture from all of them as you have space on the page to label the author for each piece so mixing in one book is fine. I have included picture of drawings, paintings, cards and 3d models so it has a nice variety.

Pieces like the children’s paintings done in their first days of school or nursery, or first cards they have designed for Mother’s Day, have a lot of sentimental value for me so it’s good to have a copy kept safe in a hardback book where they are less likely to get lost, ripped, or mangled over time. This will be lovely to look back on as the children get older.

The website is easy to use and has been designed so that a child would be able to make a book by themselves, for example if they wanted to create one as a present for family members. You simply upload each piece one by one and then fill in the title, author and a few details. For example you could write when the child did this particular picture or any comments they had to say about it.

The pages are all made of carefully selected, luxury, 120gsm paper. This is not photo paper it is more of a matte feel. The book comes in hard back and is A4 in size. You have a choice of colours and I went for navy. The cover has a cut out effect to show one of the artworks on the front cover which is a pretty nice effect. The books come with 30 pages as standard but if you want to, you have the option to add more you just pay for however many more you would like.

The books all come gift wrapped as standard so they would make a lovely gift. Gifts for grandparents is the one which immediately springs to mind – especially if the children designed some pictures specially for them and then make the book.

If you would like a book of your own, Little Arty Hands have given me a code to share with my readers. You can use the code discount50 (all one word & lowercase) to buy a book for £17.50 (so 30% off).