Budding Picassos' art gallery

Image: Penguin Books

When he got to Paris he painted many pictures. He liked blue so he decided to paint pictures all blue. "You can't paint all blue pictures", they said. "No! no! no! Picasso!". But Picasso said "Yes!".

Picasso's Trousers by Nicholas Allan is one of our kids' favourite books. They find it really funny. I like it because it encourages them to believe in themselves and look at the world a bit differently.





There's only so much space on the fridge (what with the magnetic letters, holiday magnets and random photos), for all the kids' artwork so we needed another display area.

The IKEA Dignitet Curtain Wire can be mounted on a wall and set to any length. The little curtain clips can then be used to hold any number of art pieces.

It's quite tricky to get enough tension in the wire and you need to ensure that it's level or you'll find that everything starts slipping down. Once up, it can hold quite a bit of weight and is the perfect mini gallery.

Shoe rack to car rack hack

Hot Wheels are the first choice of toy car in this house. They come in so many designs and survive being buried in the garden, sunk in the paddling pool and launched down the kids' Blutrack.

I started to look for some way of both storing them and displaying them. If you Google 'toy car storage', Pinterest throws up hundreds of ideas, both homemade and bought, for organizing them. I settled on the cheapest and easiest:

1. Buy a two-tier wooden slatted shoe rack. The slats need to be far enough apart and deep enough to store the cars. I used this one from Amazon.
2. Glue the two tiers to each other so that they make a wide enough 'road' for the cars. I used wood glue and weighed it down with tins of beans whilst it dried.
3. Add some picture hooks to the top for hanging.
4. Voila!