31 Days to a More Organized Life : Day Twenty-Three : Saving Kid's Artwork

Kids accumulate a lot of stuff. Even if you are religious about purging unused toys, clothes, books, etc, they still manage to bring in more. Once they reach school-age, they start to bring home papers, art projects, and all sorts of "mementos." We're not even to the schoolwork stage, but we have a miniature artist on our hands and for the past two years, we've accrued a lot of artwork.

Inspired by Van Gogh's Starry Night - from Fancy Nancy Art Camp

It's not that I don't love and treasure every single piece. Even the ones that make you think "what am I looking at??" are precious. But the fact of the matter is that we don't have the space to store the abundance of masterpieces that come through our door. I don't want to just callously throw them away (although some I do) but I just can't save it all. So what can you do??


When baby girl was in nursery school (pre-preschool) I picked up a scrapbooking album at Michaels and started saving the sweetest, the cutest or the most memorable pieces of art. The 12x12 pages are big enough to fit most of what she does at school and adding pages leaves the option of expanding to save the really special artwork.

A while back I saw a great idea for preserving children's art and I finally got on the ball this week. We had a stack of twenty or so projects from the various art camps that baby girl went to over the summer. Every time I walked into the garage to do laundry, there was the stack staring at me. I knew the stack needed to be dealt with, but I kept putting it off. When the sun came out bright and strong, I knew it was time.

I grabbed the kids' art easel and positioned it outside in a bright, but shady spot. Using binder clips and my iphone, I took a picture of each and every project in the stack. Then during naptime, baby girl and I went through all the photos and labeled them. I also did some minor editing to crop the pictures, straighten them, etc. The result is perfect for making an art portfolio for my budding artist.

The fabulous art camp instructors labeled the back of each project with the date and the title/style/inspiration so I just transferred the important details onto each corresponding edited photo via PicMonkey. So easy!

Now we can make a little book of baby girl's artwork using any of the various photo sites - Snapfish, Shutterfly, Blurb, or even using the photo kiosk at the pharmacy. To me this screams "grandparents Christmas gift!" And I can also save a couple of the projects and toss the rest without feeling like the worst mom ever.

Come back tomorrow for more ways to use technology to help you stay organized!

You can find the previous posts in the 31 day series here.


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