There’s no question that I’m biassed, but I’m so excited to share these DIY gifts with you.

This past year the boys have really upped their drawing-game, and I have to admit that I was caught a bit off-guard. For most of my past 6+ years as a mom, my kiddos weren’t that into drawing. They had many other interests, so I didn’t push drawing, but now that they’ve started sketching, well, I can’t hide my excitement.

The two drawings used for these gifts weren’t made expressly for this purpose, but they were images that caught my eye, and I held on to them until I knew how I’d use them.

The Cat

 

 

Alex made the cat that was put on the canvas bags. Alex LOVES cats, and his teacher taught them about the work of Laurel Burch, which lead to a series of cat drawings. Because of the idiom “let the cat out of the bag”, I thought it was a bit funny that we were putting a cat on the outside of a bag. So we added little tags that say “cat’s outta the bag!”.

For some recipients we turn the bags into a DIY art package. We gave out the bags + a pack of fabric markers that could be used to color in the cat and/or put additional designs on the bag.

The Turtle

 

I love Luc’s turtle illustration because it reminds me so much of this cute moment in his life. He was really into drawing turtles AND he would ask us every day, multiple times per day, “What do you wanna do today?”.

It was easy to ask him to draw a turtle. After he did that, I used Photoshop to add the text.

This image was perfect for mugs and notepads; two places where you’d definitely ask yourself what you want to do with your day.

Tips and Tricks

These projects were so successful that they gave us a good baseline for future gifts. Here’s what we’ve learned:

• Give the kids a lot of freedom with their drawings, you want their personality to come through.
• BUT only let them use a pencil, pen, or black marker. This will make for a really crisp image that looks great on a variety of backgrounds. It also makes it really easy to clean up any scuff marks on the image.
• Photoshop is great for cleaning up those scuffs and adding text. I used it to add their signatures to their drawings once we realized that these would be gifts.
• Don’t forget to buy something for the artists! My kids loved giving the gifts out, and they were so excited when I surprised them with notebooks with their illustrations on the cover.
• Make these pieces the centerpiece of a larger gift: mugs + coffee, notebook + nice pens, canvas bag with something personal tucked inside.
• I ordered the mugs and notepads from Shutterfly. The bags were from Cafepress.

What do you think of these simple gifts? I’m not sure if we’ll make something like this every year (how many mugs does a person need?!), but I also love that we can easily re-order more at any time.