What do you do with all the little projects?

[crunchy_mommy]

DS *loves* doing crafts lately... However our fridge door is now covered as is the hutch counter and we have a pile of drawings, I just don't know what to do with them all lol. I feel bad throwing them out because growing up my mom hardly ever kept things I made & I kind of felt like my hard work was worthless... But obviously you can't keep EVERYTHING! Which reminds me, I should start setting aside a few of the more interesting projects to put in a scrapbook-type thing for him. Anyway. So aside from the few pieces you save or give to grandma, what do you do with all the rest?

[lisavark]

make them into cards, add a picture of your ds, and send them to all your long-distance relatives. if you have enough you could use them as christmas cards!

[cocoanib]

Like you said, put them in an album/scrapbook type thing. Does'nt take up much space and you could pull them out to reminisce whenever you felt like it.

[CrunchyChristianMama]

Take photos of them and keep those. Keep the actuals of your favorites though.

[lovepiggie]

My mom hung up a clothes line across the kitchen, so we could display our art there. When we were older, she would make us take down one piece of art for each one we put up, so that it didn't get too crowded!

She also took a big box (like a big filing box) and put art, and other things in there... Report cards, etc. With dates/descriptions on the back! If you wanted to be more organized, you could keep things in folders by age, or year.

It's been really nice having that to look through...

[ellemenope]

I have used DD's paintings as wrapping paper.

We seem to accumulate a lot. It goes in a pile and then the next time I have to wrap something I tape some of her art together and wrap it. It is a bit time consuming but we don't have to buy wrapping paper.

I also have a nice spiral sketch book I let DD scribble in every couple of weeks. We name the picture together, and I ask her what she was feeling and write that down too below the date and title.

[limabean]

I use some as cards and wrapping paper. I'll put 1 or 2 pieces from each kid on the fridge, but once I have a new piece to put up the old one comes down. They also each have a memo board in their room, and a few pieces get put up there (and also taken down when they want to put something new up). I keep some -- I have a big accordion folder for each kid, and our favorite stuff goes in there, but I really only keep a few pieces per year that way.

One other thing I like to do is have our annual calendar feature their artwork (I make mine on our Mac, but Shutterfly and other photo sharing sites have similar programs). So each month's picture is a drawing/painting/whatever done by one of the kids -- they love it, and it feels like a nice way to honor their stuff (this is also an awesome gift for grandparents ).

[physmom]

I take a lot of digital photos. Some I might keep that are more interesting. My mom made a scrape book of a couple of drawings I made every year or so and labeled them by age, it's so much fun looking back through them!

[candelaria80]

Do you have a color scanner? I was a nanny and one year I kept all of the projects from each child and made a digital scrapbook from Snapfish (I believe Costco does them now as well). I simply scanned the page and uploaded them to the website like I would with pictures.
The books were beautiful. I personalized it as well with the date and age of the child on each page.
I plan on doing one every pre-school and elementary school year for my DD, I can't wait!

http://www.snapfish.com/snapfish/photo-books

[MamaPhD]

Originally Posted by CrunchyChristianMama

Take photos of them and keep those. Keep the actuals of your favorites though.

This is what we are doing. Since starting preschool in September, we are doing projects every school day and it's already piling up. I take pictures of all of them, but only a few are on the fridge and rest gets stffed somewhere or DD plays with them around the house.