Long before their small motor skills are minimally developed, kids in daycare bring home a lot of art. A lot. Of art. And by art, I mean concoctions of construction paper, glitter, popsicle sticks, marker, glue, paint, yarn, crayon, rips, and tape that sometimes defy description by even the artists themselves. (We could have a whole discussion, of course, about whether any artist is truly qualified to describe her own work, but that is BSTB – Beyond the Scope of This Blog.)
Art wall, take 1:
What does a loving parent do with all of this treasure? Well, this one tried a few different strategies, and the second to last strategy was a kid art wall. Husband D is a little twitchy about tape on the interior walls (as I discovered the first Holiday season during which we cohabited, when I scotch taped all the cards we received to a door frame and he had a verrry quiet conniption. Now I use painter’s tape. Much better.), so I surfed Pinterest (briefly — I am a bad Pinterester) and eventually settled for stringing wires on the wall and clipping the projects to them. The available wall was mostly vertical, however, so I did something I hadn’t seen on Pinterest: I mounted the wires vertically (with Command hooks at the top and bottom). It ended up looking like this.
Cute, right?
I might have known, however, that craftier Pinteresters than I had rejected this system for a reason. My smug sense of self-satisfaction faded over the subsequent months, when the wires occasionally but persistently failed to actually stay on the wall. I came to realize that the Command adhesive (in the size hooks I used — no offense, adhesive monolith 3M) was insufficiently strong at the key points. Sometimes the wall’s failure was exacerbated by the dog’s tail’s hitting the whole setup as she trotted by. Thanks for nothing, dog.
I made this gif with GIPHY. Never did that before.
Art wall, take 2:
The next and final version of the art wall involved these cork strips and this Gorilla tape. (Sorry, honey. I love you.) I lined the cork strips up vertically end to end, trimmed the two at the bottom (This involved a cleaver. It wasn’t pretty. Did I mention that I am really not that crafty?), taped the ends of each strip to the wall et voila! Art wall! I then mounted the art on the cork with clear plastic push pins.
EDIT: M saw her family portrait on the wall and chided, “It’s upside down!” Of course it is. Sorry, M. Here’s the corrected image, which does actually make more sense.
