What is the best thing to do with art that my children make? They are almost 3 so its nothing of importance - just blobs of paint and glitter and marker scribbles. My husband wants to keep it but I would love to throw it out. I have heard the suggestion to do a digital scrapbook of it but that seems like a waste of money since their art is really nothing at this point. Any other suggestions?
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Posted 4 months ago #
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Other than just keeping the prettiest pieces, one suggestion i heard recently is sending most of it to relations. Grandparents, aunts and uncles. They might quite like to have some keepsakes, it means less paper per person, and if they don't like it, it's at least not your fault if you don't keep it. I would only do this with reasonably guilt free people, who won't feel burdened by it.
Posted 4 months ago # -
Scan EVERYTHING, keep a couple to frame..and pitch the rest..indeed giving away allows other people to do the dirty work... ..unless of course your child is REALLY talented and you can sell them.
I advise scanning all ephemeral items..report cards, photos, greeting cards, art work..then treating the original like the ephemeral items it is..and pitching it after a certain time. with the scan you can always print a copy and hang it up if you want.
Posted 4 months ago # -
Hmmm... I think you should keep a few like one per month or so. I have a document box that I keep selected works from my son in. He's 7 now and finds it really interesting. If you have a place for them and you curate a bit it stops being clutter. Confession, that's me, my son has his own clutter issues!
Posted 4 months ago # -
I know just the stuff you are talking about! I made a couple of "books" with it. I bought these report folders from Wal-Mart that had plastic page protectors, and trimmed the artwork down to fit so the paint, glitter, etc. was contained. I was going to give them to my daughter to play with but Grandma wanted them for a remembrance. The front cover also had a sleeve on the front, so you can add a photo or date or whatever.
Now that my daughter is in school, I keep a box of special things she has made (NOT the daily scribbles) in a box and we go through it in June and decide what to keep. Some she thinks is dumb and we toss it. We are just keeping one little box from each year; she writes her name and grade on it and it's kind of a nice little ritual to end the school year. Granted I only have one child, maybe for a large family it would be too much. We give a lot to Grandma, but I like to have a few pieces for my own enjoyment. When she gets a little older we can re-evaluate this or when she's older she might not like to have this stuff reminding her of her youth.
A couple of construction-paper creations made the leap to Christmas treasures. The daycare ladies traced her hand and used it as a template to make several green hands to form a Christmas tree, and two brown hands to form reindeer antlers. I just love seeing those tiny hand shapes. ::sniff::
Posted 4 months ago # -
I just love this idea of taking your child's artwork and creating a gallery. Take your child's artwork, use a template to cut it into a fun shape/animal/letter etc. and frame it. Here are some examples.
http://www.sarahjanestudios.com/blog/2009/03/05/make-your-own-gallery-templates/
Posted 4 months ago # -
The problem of storing kids' art was what got me into uncluttering in the first place. I have three kids and they all love art, resulting in a river of paper that constantly threatened to overflow its banks and flood our house.
Then someone suggested I start taking digital photos of every piece, keeping a few favorites and tossing the rest. And for some reason, despite the fact that I was NOT the type for a project of that sort, the idea stuck. I was already in the habit of using my DSLR to chronicle the kids' lives and regularly uploading and backing up the photos, so photographing the art seemed like a small step, and I have been able, more or less, to keep it up. (Scanning is a good idea too, but photographing allows for 3D/multimedia works to be shown to their best advantage, so I photograph.)
After that I thought, wow, that was great, I wonder what else I can do to make things more organized around here?
Posted 4 months ago # -
Do not be too quick to ditch it all. Due to circumstances beyond my contol, I have almost nothing from my childhood. Only one stuffed animal and some photos.
Posted 4 months ago # -
Furthering the "give to relatives" idea - why don't you use the art work to make hand made cards for grand parents, etc? There are plenty of Hallmark holidays that would be great to repurpose one of the hundreds of "smiley me and sun, with trees and enormous flowers" drawings that accumulate each week. This is what we do with our girls drawings. It gives them another craft project that they can do before dinnertime and the Nannys and Grampys all love them.
Posted 4 months ago # -
Just a reminder. If you are storing these digitally make sure you are backing up regularly.
There are options for backing your data up to online services.
Or buy an external USB hard drive for less than $100 and get yourself some cheap/free backup software.
There are two types of hard drives: 1) Those that have crashed. 2) Those that will crash.
Posted 4 months ago # -
My wife and I save a choice few pieces and the rest is either scanned or photographed and then sent to Evernote. I've been using Evernote for about a year now and absolutely love it. Perfect for things like this.
Brad
Posted 4 months ago # -
We have almost 6 year old twins who love to draw and paint. Being an art lover myself and having worked in this field in my 'previous' life - the pre-kids life - I just started a new little venture addressing the whole issue of 'How to display your kid's art'. I started converting my kids' favorite pieces into canvas art. It looks amazing and the kids love seeing their artwork on canvas!! They are very proud of it and it is a great inspiration for them. Also, these pieces of art make great presents for grandma and the rest of the family!! We are currently building the website and should be up and running by Dec. 1st. The website is http://www.MyKidsArtOnCanvas.com . Email me if you want to get notified once the site is up. My email is schoepkesabine@yahoo.com .
Posted 4 months ago # -
I personally do not believe that keeping everything is an option. I think this is a wonderful opportunity to teach your child to "self-edit". Of course this is more difficult for the younger kids, but by age 5 or 6 they should certainly be able to select a few of their favorite works to keep. I use a portfolio from the Container Store and my kids pick three or four items to save each year. It is the perfect venue for them to see how their work has progressed. For immediate needs, we display a couple in our home and the rest is in a folder that must be edited by them periodically throughout the year. Do you teach your child to keep everything, or can you show them how to sort, edit and make decisions about what they should keep?
Posted 4 months ago # -
My mom used to keep everything I made in school. She had several boxes of it. When I was in my 20s we went through it together. We both chose items to keep, which ended up being very few. I only kept 1 item for myself, which was a story we wrote in 4th grade then bound into a homemade book. I don't remember how much she kept, but it wasn't nearly as much as she'd originally have. I'm guessing it's still in a box in the basement that never gets looked at, though.
Posted 4 months ago # -
Although you may love all the drawings and papers that your children
bring home from school, if you save them all the value of
special ones is diminished since they get lost in the clutter. Instead,
here's a Feng Shui suggestion for dealing with children's art: each week collect all of the papers in a folder and have your children
select one or two to keep. Put them on the refrigerator or
display them on a bulletin board. After a week, date each paper
and put them in a scrapbook or keepsake box for each child. If your
children are grown and out of the house but you still have all of
their papers, create scrapbooks of the best of their work. Give the
rest of the accumulated papers back to your children to sort, throw
away, or make their own scrapbooks.Posted 4 months ago # -
My friend did this: she only kept select ones, but most importantly she also wrote on the back the age of the child and why she kept it. So it might not be an outstanding piece of art, but there might have been a story behind it. She stored it all in a large envelope.
Posted 4 months ago # -
I think you should go through just as much of a editing process when choosing to scan/photograph artwork as you do when storing it physically.
I know scanning SEEMS like it's decluttering, but I've found that you are even less likely to EVER go through all of the scanned and stored images than you do for physical boxes of old artwork. We've barely been an entire decade of the digital photo/paperless revolution...and I rarely hear anything about what we'll do with the terabytes of "old memories I might wanna glance at in the future" we are going to accumulate over multiple generations at the rate we are going. I don't mean in terms of pure storage, that's relatively cheap. I'm thinking in terms of who is ever going to go back and look at the thousands of photographed files of art with any sort of real nostalgia? I just don't think it will have the appeal of the current situation of "hey, here's a box in the attic I need to move, let's see what's in it." It just won't be the same.
My contention is that properly storing, backing up, protecting (both in terms of privacy and making sure the file formats and media stay up to date an properly working), not to mention properly labeling and organizing all of this digital "clutter" may just be way more work and overhead long-term than a few extra boxes in the attic.
And that's assuming everyone who digitizes their memories properly takes care of it. I think many are just throwing it on a random hard drive, and forgetting about it, thinking they've decluttered. We'll be seeing news stories in less than five years about how people are losing all sorts of memories because their drives crashed, they didn't back up properly, etc.
If an old box gets wet...you can still look at it all one more time. Or salvage it. If a hard drive goes bad...it's pretty much a complete loss.
Not trying to play chicken little here...just saying if you are going to digitize your memories, you need to make sure you properly plan to maintain your digital archive for years to come.
Posted 4 months ago # -
I say scan everything, or at least the best ones. Then throw them away.
If you keep up with this as they get older, it could be really neat for them to get a photobook that has art from 3-15 (or whatever age you give them the book)... especially if they become artists! Progression is so interesting to look at.
You don't need to make a photobook each year.
Posted 4 months ago # -
Here's a solution we've found that works pretty well. Two girls, ages 3 and 6. Several new pieces of "art" each day.
On the fridge we have four 8.5x11 magnetic document holders. Each girls gets two. They can display whatever artwork they want in their frames for as long as they want to display it.
They can also display their art in their rooms on their bulletin boards.
In the "arts-and-crafts" area (dining room corner) we have big 9x12 envelopes with each grandparent's picture and name. They decide which of their projects they want to send to which grandparent. When an envelope gets full it goes in the mail. Then it's up to Granny to throw the stuff away!
There is also a recycle bin in the arts-and-crafts area and they are encouraged to recycle what doesn't get sent out.
It's been working well and it relieves my wife and I of the guilt of throwing away their projects.
your mileage may vary.
--MarkPosted 4 months ago # -
I have a refrigerator that does not allow magnets on the front. (hehe…solved the messy refrigerator front) I hung twine in my kid’s playroom with clothes pins attached. That way when there is a “new” art piece it can be hung without ending up all over the house (not to mention a place to put it to dry). Once the clothes pins are all used, a couple favorite pieces are chosen and the rest are 3 hole punched, attached with brads and given to a grandma as a “special gift”. The kids don’t mind getting rid of the art work, grandma (either one) loves it, and I didn’t have to buy artwork for that room. It is a win-win-win!
Posted 4 months ago #
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