How to store children's art projects? Talk amongst yourselves.

Kelly needs our help coming up with a storage solution for her kid's art projects:

I'm a mom to a 3 year-old preschooler. Every day, the class does art projects and she brings them home. As you can imagine, after a while, we have quite the collection. After a while, some of her art projects end up in the trash because we just simply don't have room for them. I'd love to save and preserve some of them for her to look back on when she's older, but I can't seem to be able to come up with any good ideas on how to store them.

The art projects aren't always just flat pieces of paper. Sometimes they're more intricate, delicate, and somewhat fragile. They could be things like a mask, or a pretend ride-on horse made out of yarn and construction paper. So, the size of the artwork can be a bit of a challenge. I'd hate to end up decimating her project by folding it.

Would you and/or your readers have any good ideas or solutions on how to organize, preserve and store preschool art projects?

It's so hard to throw away our kids' art, but that's the cornerstone of the solution. Think of it this way: when your daughter's 25 and you want to bring out her childhood art, she'll want to see the best 5-7 pieces. If you haul out a collection of over 200-, the best pieces will get lost in the shuffle. So either you toss them now and save the hassle of storing them, or you throw them away in 20 years.

How do you decide which is "best" when there's no subjective measurement for what makes kids' art good or bad? My suggestion: store all of her projects in a closet/box/whatever, and every month, choose the piece you like the best. At the end of the school year, you'll have 10 pieces. During the summer, enlist your partner's help to winnow the collection down to 3-5 pieces (you've still got next year's art to consider, after all). Once you've got 3-5 pieces to store instead of 200, the solution will become more obvious.

Whatever you choose, the container should be sturdy and covered to protect the art from crushing and dust. Acid-free would be nice, but since most-likely the paper on which the art wasn't created isn't acid-free, I wouldn't think it would matter.

We've also got tips for reusing kids' art in other projects:

Preserve kids' art in decoupage

Turn kids' art projects into photo calendars

Make framed prints out of your kid's art

Use kids' art projects as wrapping paper

Digitize your kid's artwork and school papers

And one storage idea: Cylindrical concrete form tubes double as tall toy storage (could work for art as well)

Others have also covered this topic well:

Alpha Mom: Storing Your Kid's Artwork (So You Can Make A Million Dollars Off It Someday)

Melissa Summers wrote this fantastic piece which may be all you need. She covers process, products, and creative display ideas, and I think I may implement that cup hook/bungee thing myself. But if you still want more, here you go:

Berkeley Parents Network: Organizing Kids' Artwork

BlueSuitMom: Storing Children's Artwork

Suite101: How to Organise Children's Artwork

Parenthackers, how have you dealt with the "problem" of saving your kid's art projects?