If you’re a mom with young kids, you’re probably bombarded with the plethora of artwork your kids are bringing home from school! In this video I share a few ways to creatively store, use, and/or share your child’s artwork without having to “throw it away” (and then feel guilty!). Let’s be honest though, you can’t keep everyyyyy single piece of artwork your kids create in their lifetime. The key is keeping a hand full of favorites and gently letting go of the others (in this case, reusing the artwork for other purposes or giving it to others who aren’t bombarded with artwork!).
Video Details
Hi everyone. So in this video, I’m going to share with you guys some quick, easy, and creative ways to manage all of the artwork that your child is bringing home. If you have young children, they’re probably doing a lot of artwork, a lot of drawings, and paintings, and stuff and they might be like taking over your house and you don’t know what to do with them. So I’m just going to share some quick and easy tips.
How to Organize Kids Artwork
The first tip is to have a section in your house for hanging all of their artwork. So of course, they’re going to make things for you or they’re going to bring things home that they absolutely love and they’re so proud of and they want to display. So inside your house, you need to have a section where they can hang their stuff.
So in that section, I would suggest having no more than like four or five pieces of artwork that they can display and kind of rotate them as they bring new ones in. So when they bring a new one in, tell them that they need to remove one off the string or off the hook or however you’re hanging them to be able to hang a new one up.
So a good thing you could do and I found this at Michaels is to use these hang tags. They’re basically just like stickers that you put on the back of drawings. Just put these little hang tags in the back and then just like hang them on a string, hang them on a wall. I think this was like a dollar at Michaels. So these are great, 36 come to a pack.
What to do With Kids Artwork
When you put one of these on and you hang it up, you take one down and the real question or the hard question is what do you do with the one that you took down? We all know that you can’t keep all of the artwork that your children are creating. So I want to share with you guys one, two, three, four different ways. I just counted right here. Four different ways or four different things that you can do with the artwork that comes off the wall or off the section.
Reusing Kids Artwork Tip 1: Wrap a Gift
What to do With Kids Artwork: Use it to wrap a gift!
So the first thing is to wrap a gift. So take the painting, take the drawing, take it off and use it as wrapping paper for a birthday party like maybe it’s their friend’s birthday party or maybe they’re giving a gift to a teacher in the beginning of the year, end of the school year, or for the holidays. So all I did here was take an 8 ½ x 11 drawing and wrapped a small box and I used a pipe cleaner to create like a fake ribbon and then a fake bow here.
Now, this is a very small gift so it worked for 8 ½ x 11 piece of artwork. But if you’re wrapping like a bigger box then obviously, use a bigger drawing or painting. If you’re wrapping something that’s really big, what you could do is just like cover the top of the gift with the artwork, something like that or you could connect the pieces like tape them all together and just create like a collage of artwork as wrapping paper. So that’s one way.
Reusing Kids Artwork Tip 2: Create a Card
The second thing you can do is create a greeting card out of a drawing or painting. So all I did here was I took a drawing from my nephew and I glued it to a piece of construction paper to make it a little bit sturdier and then I folded it in half and then when you do that, you have a nice clean surface to write on inside and then you can just like tie this to a gift, tape it to a gift or stick it inside of a gift bag and you have a homemade greeting card and it doesn’t cost any money.
What to do With Kids Artwork Tip 3: Mail it
So the third thing you can do when you take artwork off the wall and you’re not sure what to do with it, is to mail it to somebody that is not getting all the artwork every day or in a weekly basis like grandma, grandpa, nana, pops, the aunt, the uncle. It’s an unexpected piece of mail in the mail. It’s going to brighten someone’s day. It’s going to put a smile on someone’s face. Like if I receive a piece of – if I receive a drawing from my nephew or niece in the mail, I would be so happy. It’s something that I rarely receive. My house isn’t full of artwork so I have space to hang it. That’s just another thing you can do with your child’s artwork.
What to do With Children’s Artwork Tip 4: Create Memory Book
So the last thing you can do with all of your child’s artwork once it comes off the wall and you don’t know what to do with it is to take a picture of your favorite pieces. Not all the pieces, just your favorites. Collect them for a few months and once you have a good collection of your favorites that you’re ready to print, upload these pictures to like Shutterfly.com or any of those photo services where they can actually print like art books for you and get them printed into book form and then you have a nice coffee table book of all the artwork that your child created or maybe the book can go into their bedroom or just anywhere in the house where you can see it and others can see it.
It just creates a nice memory and it kind of reduces the amount of clutter because instead of having like 15 pieces of artwork or paintings that’s like this big, they’re awkward sizes, awkward shapes, there are things falling off because the glue is drying, instead of having that, you just have a very small book. So it just reduces the amount of clutter.
And when you take a picture of your child’s artwork and you put it into a book, you still have that memory because you can still see the artwork. You just don’t have the physical piece itself taking up space in your house.
OK. So those are just a few tips on how to manage all the artwork that your child is bringing home. If you do something different and you want to share with us because it’s creative, it’s unique, it’s yours, leave a comment below or create a video response and show us exactly what you do.
I hope that was helpful. I’ll see you guys soon. Bye!
