It’s lovely to see your children’s creativity shining through in the form of their artwork. And certainly, those first pictures that they make at nursery or the cards created for special occasions such as Mother’s Day are always a treasure to keep. However, if they’re regularly coming home from school with pieces of artwork as well as creating more at home, you can soon find yourself drowning under piles of paper!
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| Whether at nursery or high school how do you store the best of your children's artwork? |
Of course, not all of it will be kept, but for those pieces that you do want to keep, what is the best way to store them? Here are my ideas for how to store your children’s artwork:
Snap frames
One of the most popular ways of storing a child’s artwork at the moment - as increased in popularity by social media – is through the use of special ‘snap’ frames. These open up from the front and have special straps to hold the artwork in place.
Because of the fact that they open from the front, they enable you to change the pieces regularly. This makes them not only a great way of displaying your child’s artwork, but also changing it up to give a different look to the room with the pieces on display. You may even be able to store more than one piece per frame to help with storage!
Display frames
It’s lovely for children to see their artwork on display, and it can really help your child’s confidence to grow when they see how much pride you take in something they’ve created. With this in mind, why not choose a few special pieces and frame them properly? They make for a great quirky addition to a home, especially when displayed in unusual places like a downstairs toilet!
Memory boxes
Memory boxes are a great way of storing children’s artwork and other precious items. Choose a sturdy box (you can even buy personalised boxes) and aim to store a couple of year’s worth of items per box.
You will have to sift through their artwork and only keep the special pieces or the pieces they’ve worked hard on so as not to fill the boxes too quickly, but memory boxes can easily be stored away in a loft or cupboard, without taking up too much space.
Portfolios
Encourage your child to get into the habit of only keeping their best work, as this will encourage healthy decluttering habits later on in life. Why not buy your child an artist’s portfolio, or a plastic wallet file, and ask them to store any special pieces within that? This way, they are in control of what pieces they want to keep, but when full, they will need to reassess the pieces they’ve chosen and decide whether they can switch out any new pieces for those in the file.
Picture rails
In a dedicated playroom or within a child’s bedroom, why not set up some picture rails? These can act almost as washing lines for your child’s artwork, displaying multiple pieces at once. They can also be used when waiting for painted pictures to dry – just make sure the piece isn’t so wet that they drip!
Digital Storage
While it's not quite the same as having the actual paintings or craft when space is in short supply creating a digital version of the artwork will allow you to keep the memories without taking up physical space. You can create a folder on cloud storage (eg Dropbox or Google Drive) and save all the images there. If you make it a shared folder others will be able to view and save to it as well. Digital storage allows you to capture other moments and designs too like LEGO masterpieces and baking creating a digital diary of your child's creativity. Every year you can then create photo books with best creations so you can enjoy looking back on them.
Bonus Tip
Before you display the artwork or put it into storage make sure to add your child's name and the date on the back (if you don't know when exactly it was produced the year will do). Trust me, when looking back at the artwork in years to come it will be appreciated knowing who created it and how old they were.
However you choose to store or display your child’s artwork, know that you are not alone in sometimes feeling overwhelmed by the amount of paper produced. Some things are always going to be destined for the recycling bin, and others we naturally want to keep. The key is to find a way of storing those precious pieces that works within your home. I hope I’ve given you some inspiration here for how to do so!
