Oh, how I wish I did save all my daughter’s artwork. But, alas, I’m a tosser, not a hoarder. More power to you if you’ve got the space (and the time) to organize and save all of that artwork that comes home from your child’s school or daycare. There are some truly adorable things and then there are some things that are not and even then I feel bad for throwing them away.  Will she want a box full of collages made from photos cut out of magazines when she’s 10? 15? 20? 25? Probably not. There are a few select things that I keep, usually things that display the size of her adorable little hands or feet at a certain age. But what to do with everything else? Well, everything gets a turn on display in our dining room. I actually created this from something I saw on Pinterest! And it actually turned out half decent – it’s amazing.

But what to do with the old art when I need room for the new stuff? Well, I downloaded this app on my iPhone called ArtKive. It’s advertised as The Clutter Free Way to Save and Enjoy Your Child’s Artwork. Since I found this app more than halfway through her daycare career, I had to backtrack and was lucky that her daycare puts the date on almost everything. Artkive lets you file stuff by child and you can add a date, grade, title and description.  I decided to put all of her stuff from her daycare center into one album instead of creating one per year. I took photos only of the ones that I thought were extra cool. I think I ended up putting about 50 photos in.

When she left that daycare, I decided to print her a photo book of my favorite pieces of her artwork from her time there. The only downfall was that the book was pretty expensive. I think it came out to around $50 with the shipping. Had I created the book myself with photos on shutterfly or somewhere, I could have used a free photo book coupon and gotten the book much cheaper. But, I liked how Artkive formats each page consistently and the ease at which I could add them on the fly right from my phone instead of uploading photos onto my computer and then onto shutterfly. Since I was making a book that spanned almost three years, I decided I could spare this expense for the effort it saved me on creating the book myself.  Here’s the finished product: