organized creativity

as a mom of two small creative humans, we have an endless supply of unique, sometimes holiday themed, art.  and i'm fairly certain that many of you can relate.  so. many. crafts.  and while i love that my children explore and experiment with their creative side, there are only so many pieces of art that i'm willing to have in my home at one time.  over the last two years our craft creation has doubled in production.  we only have so many walls.  i also struggle with putting their creations in the recycling bin.  i want to keep all of it.  every single santa, mitten, half coloured picture. keep it. because they won't be little like this and we won't always have an endless supply of shaving cream glue art, aka puffy paint.  the realist in me will never allow this to happen.  instead of having my home turn into the children's art museum and then force myself to recycle art i didn't want to, i came up with a solution that let's me have my cake and eat it too.

first: figure out a way to display what they've created and not have it take over our house.  while i love to display what both future artists have created i don't necessarily want it everywhere.  my solution for this was to designate two specific areas for kid art.  a wall in our family room and a photo wire in our pantry.  by only having two designated spaces for their all their masterpieces, we can rotate the gallery as new pieces arrive and recycle older pieces.  i try to de-clutter our art galleries every few weeks. up until a few days ago we were still rockin' a pretty sweet santa and a couple christmas trees.

second: i don't want to just get rid of what they created.  one day when the kids are too busy to do arts and crafts i wish for all the pieces they once made and i'll kick myself for getting rid of all of it. the struggle is real.  on the other hand, i also don't want my attic full of never ending boxes full of twenty year old art.

i recently started taking photos of each art project they've done before i put it in the recycling.  i'm in the process of using the photos to make a photo book.  i use the program in iphoto.  i like it for two reasons.  easy to use and the quality is really good.  i use it every year for our photo calendar and have a couple books.  once i get to about twenty-five pages i think i'll get it printed.  by making an art  photo book i get to keep all of the art, without actually keeping all of the art.


happy friday!