Turn a Child's Drawing Into a Gift Grandparents Will Keep

By the Scribblie team · Published October 10, 2026 · 9 min read

Grandparents rarely want the gift that costs the most. They want the thing that has the child in it. A drawing, with its wobbly lines and the title in your child's own spelling, beats a shop-bought ornament every time, as long as it is turned into something that can sit in daily life.

There are plenty of ways to do it, from a thirty-minute job with a printer and a frame to an order with a printing service. We have gone through the main ones, with a note on what each is good at, where it tends to disappoint and what to prepare first.

Start with the file, because every gift depends on it

Whatever you pick, the quality of the final object is limited by the quality of the picture you start with. A blurry, shadowy photo will make a blurry, shadowy mug.

Take the photo in daylight by a window, with the paper flat and the phone held straight above it, and crop close to the edge. We wrote a whole guide to photographing a child's drawing, and the short version is no flash, no shadows and no slanted page. Take a few shots and choose the sharpest.

Keep the original photo untouched in a folder, and do any brightening or cropping on a copy. Name it with the date and your child's title. A year from now you may want to reorder, and you will be glad to find it.

If you have a flatbed scanner, a scan at a decent resolution will be more even than a photo, and for a very large print it is worth the trouble. For everything else, a good phone photo is enough.

Ask your child before you take the drawing away

It is their drawing, which is easy to forget. Some children are thrilled to see it on a mug. Others are alarmed that the drawing they made on Tuesday has been taken away and turned into something else. If you are keeping it secret for a surprise, be sure it is a drawing they have already finished and will not miss.

You can also involve them in choosing. Ask which of three drawings should go on the gift, and let them decide where the title goes. Children take it seriously, and it turns the gift into a joint project. Often they want to add something: a signature, a date, a message to the grandparent in their own writing. That is the best part of the whole object, so let them.

A framed print: the simplest gift and often the best

If you only do one thing, do this. Print the drawing at A4 or a little larger, put it in an inexpensive frame and give it with the original, if you are happy to part with it, tucked behind the print.

Home printers produce a decent colour print on plain paper, and thicker photo paper makes it look finished. For a high-quality version, a local print shop or an online printing service can print on heavier art paper. Order a test print before a big one: colours on screen and on paper rarely match exactly, and bright marker pinks and greens tend to shift.

A mount (the card border inside a frame) makes a child's drawing look deliberate, as if it belongs on a wall, rather than a sheet in a frame. Cheap frames often come with one. If the drawing is not the same shape as the frame, the mount can be cut to fit, or you can let a white border do the job.

Keep the frame away from direct sunlight and damp. We have more on caring for the originals in our guide to storing artwork.

A mug: charming, and fussier than it looks

A mug from a child's drawing is the classic gift, and it can be great. It is also where quality varies the most, because the picture is wrapped round a curved surface and sits near a handle.

Pick a drawing with bold lines and strong colours. A fine pencil sketch will go pale and vanish. Choose a design with some empty space around it, because the printing area is a band, and anything near the top or bottom edge gets cut. Check the preview that the service gives, and look for where the handle sits. A face that hides behind the handle is a common disappointment.

Some services print the same design on both sides, and some wrap it around. For a single, central drawing, a one-sided print with a short message on the other side works nicely.

Test your expectations as well. The colours may be less vivid than the paper original, and the print will not feel like crayon. If you are comfortable with that, a mug is a lovely daily reminder. A mug is also a gift children can make a version of themselves, using ceramic pens that a grown-up bakes in the oven, and the results can be sweet. Those pens and the oven step are for adults to handle, and the instructions on the pens should be followed exactly.

A photo book: the one they will actually open

If we could give a grandparent only one thing, it would be a small book. A book collects a year of drawings and the child's words about them. It can be picked up and passed round, and it lives on the coffee table instead of in a drawer.

Choose twelve to twenty drawings that tell a little story of the year, and put each on its own page with a title in the child's words. If your child dictates a sentence about each, type it in, spelling and all. Add a date. A page with "This is my dog but he is also a rocket, 2026" is worth ten pages of perfect captions.

Services differ in paper, binding and colour, and prices differ too. We will not quote any. Look for one that shows a preview of every page and lets you move images around, and if you can, order a single copy first and check it.

A book is also the best form for the originals you cannot keep. Photograph, print, give away the paper to a grandparent who wants it, and keep the book at home too.

A calendar: gets used every day

A calendar with twelve drawings, one per month, has a built-in reason to be opened. Pick drawings that suit the months, such as a snowman for January or a sun for July, or let the child choose freely. Many print services offer calendars, and a few families make their own on a home printer.

One catch is timing. A calendar must arrive before the year starts, so order well ahead, because printing and delivery slow down in the run-up to the holidays. For a family that celebrates in November, order in October, or earlier.

Add birthdays of family members on the right dates, if the service allows. A calendar with the grandchild's drawings and the family's birthdays in it is the kind of object that stays on a fridge for the whole year and gets mentioned on every phone call.

Tea towels, cushions and other fabric things

Printing on fabric is possible, and for a tea towel, a tote bag or a cushion cover, it can work nicely. The same rules apply, so go for strong lines, simple shapes and bold colour. Fabric is less forgiving than paper, so a drawing with delicate detail will lose it.

There is a no-printer route, too. Fabric pens or crayons let a child draw directly on a plain cotton tea towel or bag, and a grown-up fixes the colour by ironing, following the instructions on the pack. A tea towel signed by the child and given with a card is cheap, personal and a great first gift project. Children tend to take extra care when drawing on something that will be used, and the wobble makes it better. Keep the iron out of children's reach.

If you decide to have your child's drawing professionally printed on fabric, check how it should be washed, and expect the colours to soften over time.

Plush toys from drawings: exciting, but know what you are buying

Some companies turn a child's drawing into a soft toy. The idea is wonderful, your child's monster in your child's arms, but a plush toy is a three-dimensional object made by people and machines working from a flat drawing, and a lot gets interpreted.

A seven-legged dragon with lopsided wings will come back with a certain polish and a few legs fewer, or a look the maker has made their own. The face may be simplified, and the colours will shift. If your child is expecting an exact copy, there may be tears. If they know it is the maker's version of their dragon, it can be glorious.

We have not ordered from every service, and quality, price and lead time vary. We would read reviews, look at photos from other customers, check that the toy has safety information for the age of the child who will use it, and allow plenty of time. A plush toy is not a last-minute gift. Some makers can take weeks.

For a cheaper, quicker and more personal alternative, you can sew a simple felt version together with your child, or have them stuff and stitch a basic shape, with a grown-up handling the needle. It will not look professional and it may be better for that.

Gifts made together, and gifts for the calendar

Some of the best gifts are the ones a grandparent is part of. If they live close, draw something together and swap the results (more on drawing with grandparents), and then frame the pair side by side. A grown-up's drawing next to a child's is a surprisingly moving thing to hang.

Around festivals, a drawing makes a card that is better than any from a shop. A Diwali card with a child's rangoli-style pattern, or a Christmas one with a lopsided tree, takes ten minutes and will be kept in a drawer for decades. We have ideas in the Diwali craft guide and the Christmas drawing guide.

One more thing about giving. When your child hands the gift over, grandparents are tempted to say the drawing is "beautiful" and leave it there. If you can, nudge them toward asking about it instead: what is this, what happens next? Our note on praising a child's drawing explains why it matters, and it makes the gift land better.

What a print always changes

Every printed item is a translation. The paper original has texture, shine and a certain pressure of crayon that a printer cannot copy. Prints are flatter, brighter or duller than the real thing, depending on the process.

Order a proof, look at it with your child and adjust before the big order. Keep the original somewhere safe, and remember that a drawing on a mug is a different object from a drawing on the fridge.

A last practical point: before uploading any drawing to a printing service, check what the service does with your files and whether it keeps them. Drawings can have names and places written on them, and you may want to crop those out first.

What to do this week

Pick one drawing, take a clean photo by the window and print it at a size that fits a frame you already have. Ask your child to write a title and sign it. If it goes well, you have a gift in half an hour, and you have a file ready for a mug or a book the next time.

If the grandparent lives far away, post the framed print with a short letter from the child, even if the letter is three words and a drawing of a cat.