Displaying Books

We have books everywhere in this house.  We have two bookshelves just for kids' books; one in the living room and one in the upstairs hallway.  We have a basket of them in the family room.  We have a bin of them in the toy room.  They are even lined up on the guardrail of my son's bed.  So when I saw this in the Pottery Barn Kids catalog, I knew I wanted to do something like it in my daughter's room.  But I also knew we weren't going to be buying that shelf.

Instead, I found a shelf for $5 at Goodwill.  It was black so I just primed and painted it green.  The letters came from JoAnn's and I painted those also.  (I think they came to $12 total without a coupon.) I put some old children's book illustrations in dollar store frames, and chose some books I especially liked (the little one was mine when I was a kid).  Here's how it turned out:

Not exactly Pottery Barn, but not too bad for less than 20 bucks.

There are so many cute ways to display children's books.  Here's the shelves my sister made out of rain gutters:

Aren't they cute????  You can find instructions here to make your own.