Be it kindergarten, childcare, the first years of school, Grandma's home, or your home, your children create many pictures and paintings on paper and bring them home to show you, and you keep them all... and the pile gets bigger and bigger and eventually you consider buying a new shed
just to store them in. There's no more room on the fridge and all the walls that you can hang them on are covered. Every effort is so precious, you don't have the heart to throw them out, not to mention how your child would react if she discovered you threw her precious gifts in the bin! What else can you do with them? Here's a few ideas:
Wrapping paper: With the pictures that aren't your child's best efforts, use them as wrapping paper for gifts for birthdays, Christmas, and any other occassion where wrapping a gift is required. Tape the pictures together for larger pieces of wrapping paper. This makes the wrapping paper just that little bit more personal.
Placemats: With the better quality pictures, get them laminated and turn them into placemats for the dinner table, sideboard, shelves, etc. Large ones, or several small ones placed together, can make good large mats for playdough use and the like. You could even make a very large mat (if you can find a company with a large laminator designed for posters and maps) by placing many pictures together. This could be used as a drop mat for the children's paint easle/table, or the kitchen bench/table to help keep the floor clean. They also make good gifts for close friends and relatives.
Calenders: With a copy of a plain one-page calender, attach the picture to the top of it, laminate it, and stick some magnets behind it to create a personalised magnet calender for the fridge - do this repeatedly and create more for the fridges of friends and family. With the calender pages for a one-month-per-page calender, use glue or tape to attach 12 pictures of the same size to the back of each calender page and a couple for the cover, then bind them in the middle to create a flip page calender. Alternatively, on a regular 12 page calender, cover up the pictures with your children's pictures.
Cards: Glue smaller pictures, or cut pictures to size, to one side of a piece of cardboard folded in half. Use these as personalised cards for Christmas, birthday, or any other occassion.
Puzzles: Glue a picture to a piece of thick cardboard or thin light board of wood, making sure to cover the card/wood with a thin even film of glue all over, very carefully lay the peper over it, and smooth out any air bubbles. Use a clear sealant over the top to provide some protection to the paper. When dry, cut the board (using appropriate tools for the material used) into a jigsaw pattern. This gives you a colourful personal jigsaw puzzle for the kids to play with.
Give old furniture a face lift: The same gluing method can be used to decorate old furniture. Finish by covering with a layer of clear resin or multiple layers of clear lacquer to take the wear and tear. Turn old wooden table tops, shelves, bench tops, etc; into something more interesting by getting an appropriately cut and smoothed clear glass cover to fit the table top (or whatever you are doing it to), with small holes for fitting screws in the corners (or at set points around the edges if round in shape). Layer pictures under the glass, then using the screws, fix the glass to the table top (or whatever it is).
Books: For a good memento you can bind a heaps of pictures of the same size into a book. Most good office supply stores have a number of different products that you can use to do this, and it doesn't have to cost a fortune. Binding the pictures like this keeps them together in one neat little package, saves space, and protects them from being lost and damaged. This also makes a very good personal and sentimental gift for the Grandparents.
Materials for a new collage: Instead of having dozens of pictures that you can't do much with floating around, you and your child can make one large collage together using many other pictures as the materials. This is especially good for those artworks where pieces of macaroni, fabric, cardboard, bottle caps and everything else under the sun have been glued to the paper, making it lumpy and bumpy and unsuitable for most of the other ideas above.
