we worked with a local paint your own pottery studio -- each class painted a piece of pottery and then we used the finished product in our auction. we purchased the pieces and the studio fired them after the children painted them.
Not only is this easy but it can be done in a short time period too, which saved my bacon a couple of years ago.
I had a project that I had been working on all year, a Classopoly board. At the end of the project I went to pick up the board at Kinko's only to be told that the pictures of the kids I had submitted could not be formatted to fit the board. Aaaack! All that work.
I went to photomosaics.com and downloaded about 75 or so pictures of the class from their first communion, along with a number of pictures of the church. I chose one picture of the church and they made a mosaic. It was in black and white, which turned out to be really stunning and done on canvas, which I took to be professionally stretched and mounted. The overall size was 20x30. The canvas itself was about $100 and I paid another $25 for overnight shipping and $40 for stretching. It sold for $500. I was able to get a second one printed for $65 and free shipping and another $40 for stretching and it was matched at $500. Plus, the parent who purchased it has an employer who will match, so they matched the $500. In the end, it brought in $1500 ($1400 after the cost of the second one).
Our 2nd grade class did sunflower artwork (directed drawing), then I took them all home, scanned them in, uploaded them to Walmart.com and had a 50x60 fleece blanket printed. They have a "Collage Blanket" where you can upload up to 30 pics and it will randomly place them (no accusations of favoritism) on the blanket. It was so cute, two other classes copied us.
I don't see an option to add a pic to the post, so here's my
Photobucket album
. There is also a pic from last year's 1st grade project.
