Crafts are my nemesis. I don’t like creating the craft (enter Kiwi Crate), facilitating the project or dealing with the mess. But I know that my kids, especially my 6 year old, wants to be creative. I needed to find a solution that would fulfill their creative desire and keep the supplies to a minimum.
I love this idea of an old wine crate (towards the bottom of the post) but my trips to the antique store are limited these days with three kids 6 and under. Fortunately, Target handles small children well. Look what I found in the garden section for $3.99! It’s a potted planter where the cups are attached. (It also comes in a pretty yellow or red)
Isn’t this perfect?! The kids don’t need tons of supplies. Markers, crayons, colored pencils, a few scissors, glue stick, hole punch and small tape dispenser will do.
I can leave this out on our kitchen table and the kids are free to grab paper from our paper bin (which holds lots of scraps) and do whatever projects they want. If they would like to keep their project they can put it back into the paper bin. If they don’t the cleaning lady (aka me) will gather whatever is left out at the end of the day and throw it away without any sense of emotional attachment to the art my child has just made.
This has alleviated so many questions about when we can do crafts, anxieties and frustrations (on my part). Instead of bins of crayons and markers being lugged out everyday, we have created a small, manageable craft station where my kids are free to be artsy whenever they please.
How do you simplify kids craft supplies?
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I use old wipes containers to hold popsicle sticks, markers, crayons etc…
We do something similar, but it’s a silverware caddy instead. It can be carried to another table if needed too. 🙂
What a great and simple idea!! I hate having to lug out my Tupperware containers filled with markers, crayons, and God knows what-all every time one of my kids wants to get crafty.
Nice! We have a stack of those “sterilite” drawers. A big one on the bottom and a smaller one of three drawers on top. The crayons/stickers/glue/stencils/googly eyes are in the drawers (I put each thing into smaller school boxes that fit in the drawers, but they never stay in the actual boxes. Then my OCD comes out and I go through it once a month and put it all back together…) and the bigger things like coloring books, paper tubes, art projects go in the big drawer. If something is on the floor, that means they don’t care about it and I can sweep it up!
Cute! I’m going to use the planter for growing herbs, though — we still have to haul craft supplies in and out of lock-up each time they’re used. Otherwise we get “art” on the walls, clothing, the cats…
What a cute idea. I use a cleaning caddy to hold our art supplies. It works great because it’s portable and just the right size for enough supplies for a simple project.
We have a “craft desk”. My husband got a big old desk with tons of drawers for free when the place he worked for was closing. It has four long drawers and 3 small drawers. EVERYTHING crafty goes in it and you can do your crafts on top of it. The drawers get pretty messy after a while, but no one know because they can’t see it! Then every couple months when the kids are at school I will clean it out.
That’s a great idea! I will have to look into that as we have similar issues.
thanks for posting!
Jill