Greetings, Happy Scrappers!
‘Tis the season for organization and purging. Today, I’ve got some hot tips about how to organize the single source of piled paper in my house: my children’s artwork. My daughter just turned four and she now generates page after page of artistic masterpieces, most of which warm my heart and make me want to tuck them away forever. However, I know just how dangerous that urge can be: after all, I have been a kindergarten teacher for 20 years now and back in the day I used to keep every scrap of lovely art my students gave to me. Let me tell you: it piles up fast. Eventually, I developed a purging system: first of all, I would only keep the work that made me smile or warmed my heart. If it was, say, a ripped out, scribbled-on page from a coloring book it was cherished for a day or two and then recycled. However, if it was a sweet, colorful portrait of them (or me) with 11 fingers and purple hair, I was more apt to keep it. The other non-negotiable is that it has to have the child’s name and the date written on it. Trust me, this will make it much easier to organize artwork as the years go by.
Once you start to accumulate the work, it’s important to have a system with which to organize it. I have been looking on Pinterest and found some clever ideas for how to store and organize the artwork. Here are some examples:
use labelled cardboard poster containers to store rolled up art
photograph the art and print it for use in pocketed page protectors
slip the pieces into page protectors and place in labeled binders
use repurposed shoe storage to store larger/bulky pieces
But what fun is keeping the artwork if you never look at it? Here are some great ways to display the work you’ve kept:
scan or photograph the work and make a collage for display source
find various colors and sizes of frames for displaying a variety of work as a cluster on a wall
use scanned or photographed work in a photo book
hang work from wire lines stretching across the wall
Of course, one of my favorite ways to display the work is by incorporating it into a scrapbook layout. Here’s one I did where I used my daughter’s painting as the background paper:
Hope this post has inspired you to do some organizing and displaying of your own!
Lisa Barton @ Vintage Celebrations says
Some fabulous ideas here – thank you! I have 4 young daughters and lots of artwork each day! Now I can find a way to display all of them! A post on what to keep and what to bin would be useful too ;)
Julie says
Any of those systems is better than my solution: a huge art folder wherein I tucked artwork from my daughter and son. Undated, of course! *facepalm*