Q&A Wednesday: what should I do with kid’s artwork & crafts?

Reader Jennifer Sutton recently asked

What to do with papers & crafts from your kids from school?

It’s a perennial issue for any parent — the rate at which those masterpieces are created is pretty astounding. If you don’t have a system for organizing them, they can quickly take over kitchen counters and clog up mail tables.

I definitely share your pain. Not too long ago our kitchen counters disappeared under an avalanche of papers.

Art projects, sheets-upon-sheets of paper demonstrating a growing grasp of phonics and fine motor skills, weather booklets, chicken soup with rice poetry notes, – you name it, and it was on the counter.

The detritus of a 3-day-a-week preschool program and first grade.

As I started to tackle the mountain, my mind wandered to the hundreds of posts I have seen on Pinterest of moms painstakingly turning their children’s artwork into albums or a gallery of thumbnails (for hundreds of dollars no less).

Like this:

{image via: The Great Remember}

And this:

{image via: Apartment Therapy}

I looked back at our pile and wallowed for a moment. My urge to dump the entire lot in the trash bin seemed so harsh.

“Gosh, I must really be a bad mom,” I thought to myself.

I tried to put the brakes on the mommy-comparison doom loop that had been triggered, but as you know, once it starts, it can be hard to stop. I desperately did a mental catalog of my overbooked schedule trying to think of a time slot I could use to turn this artwork and such into a display project.

Fortunately, I was rescued by a question that flashed across my mind.

Do you really need the physical artwork in order to honor the memory of this year?

The answer was a resounding no.

I thought back to the time I had to go clean out my closet at my mom’s house a few years after graduating from college. All those notebooks from physics & AP English I thought I’d definitely go back through someday? Trash. Notes passed to and from friends in class from 3rd grade on? Ditto. Art projects? Gone.

All that stuff, while meaningful in the moment, was nothing but trash ten, fifteen, twenty years on.

And so it will be for your children too.

Tossing tired artwork most certainly does not cause the memories of the past year to disappear. You do not need physical objects to hold on to remember that your two-year-old went to a preschool program and thrived.

So rather than fetishizing the artwork, why not do everything you can to enjoy it in the moment and then get rid of it?

Here are a few ideas for doing just that:

Save your children’s artwork in a storage container or portfolio bag and whenever you need to wrap a gift, use their masterpieces. I do this for abstract pieces of work that come home from preschool. I keep a portfolio bag at the back of our coat closet just inside the door so it’s easily accessible, but out of the way. Grandparents LOVE getting gifts wrapped in artwork.

Hang a shower string from Ikea on a wall and then hang your artwork of the moment on with clips or clothespins.

Hang clipboards in a grid section on a wall in your kitchen or playroom. Then rotate worthy artwork through the clipboards.

This clever blogger cut out vinyl frames and stuck them to a child’s bedroom door. Tape some clips to the vinyl and hang the artwork – or just use tape! I love how the bright yellow frames add a lovely pop of color.

If you have a kid-height coat rack, it would be a brilliant spot to display masterpieces. If you don’t you could always do something similar in a playroom or child’s bedroom.

Mallory & Savannah at Classy Clutter have come up with a genius solution. Purchase some pre-painted trim at your local Home Depot or Lowes, have them cut all the pieces for you. Then once you are home, nail the rows in place and you have a gallery that’s ready to go!

We display the best work from the week or month on a magnetized Wexel frame in the playroom and keep a stash of larger paper canvases in the portfolio in our coat closet to wrap presents. Anything that doesn’t make it to either of those gets tossed immediately.

What do you do? Do you think I am a minimalist Grinch on this topic?