Organizing artwork

Lately, I have been in an organizing whirlwind.  A bystander might mistake it for nesting...but there are no more babies coming to this house.  I think I am liking order and structure in the midst of life with 3 children.  If I had an Ikea near me, I would have bought a million cute little boxes, file holders and baskets to finish this spring cleaning.  I will have to wait for my road trip through Atlanta this summer.  My shopping list is already getting pretty big - I can't wait!

Last week I got busy on the kid's art work.  Last time I was at Ikea, I picked up a few of these tension rod curtain hangers and have been using them to display artwork.

I have to brag a little on the kids...they are so creative!  Here is one my favorites from 4 year old Abby:

I think it is our family going into space.  I love how she designed the rocket.  If you ask her about the picture, the amazing thing is the story that would go with it.  She has a great imagination!



And here are 2 of my favorites from Caleb.  He does a lot of art at kindergarten.

The picture on the left is a self portrait.  Isn't it great?  My favorite is the picture on the right.  It is the inside of his brain.  How did he think of that????  Love it.

One of the things that is hard to keep organized is all of these lovely pieces of art.  We use to have drawings all over the house.  And of course, the kids don't want to throw away any of it.  So there are a few systems that I have created that have worked wonders.







The oldest system in place is this pegboard.  I got the idea from Pottery Barn many years ago, but I didn't want to pay an arm and a leg for it.

My Dad helped me build this pegboard from left-over scraps from the workroom at our house.  The back is framed out with 1x2 boards.  The one in this picture is done beautifully with mitered corners (thanks to my Dad's carpentry skills).  The one hanging in the kitchen is done with squared edges (thanks to my fear of measuring and cutting angles).  I did buy the hooks and pencil holders at Pottery Barn but I don't think they would be too hard to make.







The next system I started was creating binders for the kids with their favorite artwork.  I have dividers within each binder, and clear page holders with their artwork.  I can't keep everything, but I am trying to keep some of my favorites.  Abby loves to get the binders down and flip through them.







With all of these methods of organizing art around the house, I still found lots of little pieces of paper EVERYWHERE!  I can't control the artwork that comes home from school, but I decided that I could control what we have around the house.  I purchased a sketch book for both of them (each with about 100 pages).  I made sure there wasn't any way to tear out the pages.  And I took away 95% of loose paper from around their craft area.  They both love it!  They like to go back and look at their drawings and even add to them.  When they fill up the book, I will label the date and purchase another one.

So that is what I have been doing in between laundry, dinner and diapers.  Having things organized keeps me sane.  You can usually tell when I am feeling more stressed by how much organizing I am doing.  The more busy I am, the more things get re-organized around the house.  Kind of ironic, I know.  And one day, this cute face is going to add to the art clutter.  I can't wait to see what he comes up with...