Mommy Tips on organizing your child’s artwork!
The first year of having a baby is challenging. Not just getting the feeding and sleep schedule down, then you just have all this “stuff” that you have to have for all their growth milestones. So by the time Sofia reached the age of two, I had been doing a constant removal, donating, and restructuring of the closets and garage with all the different toys, baby gear, and clothes. Finally, I got around to organizing all her artwork, day care memorabilia, and cards that we had received from her baby shower, and her first birthday. Up to this point, they were literally in different bags shoved in the back of the closet somewhere.
If you are like me you want to save all the “first” drawings, finger paintings, hand-prints, foot-prints, family photos; but I did not really want to just throw it in a bin marked with her name and date of year. I went to Target and got two binders, one for the artwork and one for the cards. The binder for the artwork was just your basic binder but in the front it featured a side plastic pocket.
I used the pocket to put all the little pieces that were to small to be hole punched. The rest is pretty self-explanatory. I just used a 3 ring hole punch and organized all the art work I wanted to save.
For the bigger pages I just punched in the center of the paper, so it still could fit in the binder.
Very easy to store and everything is now neatly saved!
The binder for the cards is also easy to assemble. The difference with this one is how the cards are stored. I grouped them in categories: baby shower, first birthday, Baptism etc. I purchased clear plastic zip pouches that are made for a 3 ring binder and put each category of cards in the pouches and labeled them.
I am sentimental, and for the first year there was so many cards, I couldn’t bring myself to throw them out. So this was another organizational space saver for me!
Now since Sofia is in her 2nd year of day care,I have been much more picky of which of her art work I save. I plan on doing a small binder for this year as well, but I also started doing digital saving. Again, I am sentimental. I do like to be able to physically hold and really want to keep those nice pieces she does, especially the ones they put on canvas or laminate. But in the essence of saving space/reducing clutter; you can’t beat saving digitally.
There are a few apps out there that you can create basically a digital binder of your child’s art work. I use a free app called: Art My Kid Made
This app streamlines the process of archiving your child’s art and then gives you options on how to share it with friends and family. The key functions of this app are:
- Edit: You can edit, crop, rotate and add special effects to your child’s artwork. You pick a “Fridge” to save all of your child’s artwork. You can add it from your gallery or take a picture using the app. The app date stamps the picture and tags it with their name and age. You can also add a description note. Easy!
- Dropbox: Additional storage or backup to Dropbox of your child’s work in Real time with Dropbox.
- Social Sharing: choose if and how you want to share the images to friends or family using Facebook or Twitter.
- Evernote: another resource to backup and tag your child’s artwork in real time with Evernote!
- Pop Carte: Print a greeting or post card through Pop Carte.
Hope this is helpful for organizing your child’s art work! Have any additional tips? Please share.
**If you enjoyed reading this DIY for your organizing your child’s art work check out my DIY post on making a baby memory box!
Thank you for reading!
Carrie~
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