Scrapbook Basics!

Scrapbooking your children's artwork

If you’re like a lot of households with children, you have a lot of stacks (or bags or boxes or bins) of children’s artwork. Whether it comes home from school or is created right at the kitchen table, children love to show off their artwork, and parents with soft hearts have trouble disposing of it readily.

There are a few solutions short of ending up with bulging scrapbooks filled with nothing but original art. If you haven’t sat down to think about a better way to keep your children’s artwork, here are a few ideas.
Select and keep only one piece of artwork per week. Even though this tactic will garner quite a few pieces (at least 52!), it will give you a good representation of your children’s growing skills and interests and artistic gifts to your family.

Make archival copies of the artwork, reducing the size by half. Many scrapbook stores have color copiers especially used for making archival copies. Use the reduction features to resize the artwork you want to scrapbook by half or less, thereby making room for several treasures on one scrapbook page. Dispose of all but your most treasured of the originals once you have good copies. Locally, copiers are available at Heirlooms by Design, Archivers and Memory Bound.

Take a photo of your child with the artwork. Whether you intend to scrapbook the artwork or just archive the masterpieces, taking a photo allows you to do several different things: scrapbook the photos you take, remember the art work without actually keeping it, make digital files (on a cd) of the artwork, which means you can store all those great memories without taking up all that space, create an artwork photo album, or all of the above.

Hopefully, one of these ideas will help your organizing. These tips might also be applied to other keepsakes such as those from vacations, sports seasons, you name it. Good luck organizing and keepsaking!

Thanks to Tracey Rhodes - Des Moines Scrapbooking Examiner