Paint Drying Rack Hack!

Happy Friday! Here's five details for a Paint Drying Rack Hack! Thanks to Kacey at Doodle Bugs Teaching's Five for Friday for giving me opportunity to share!

My kidpeople LOVE painting and we do paintings of all sorts. There is one little glitch to painting joy, though– where to dry all those works of art? Drying racks are big and expensive. Even foldable clothes drying racks take up a lotta space and get in the way. So, look what I did...

That is an undershelf hanging basket, the kind that just slides on to a shelf and is sold in shelving or storage departments... pretty much like this one. And it's only about eight bucks on Amazon.

Click it to see it. 

In the photo it is is full of wet paintings hung with clothes pins from the basket grid. I can put my arm into the basket area to easily pin the artwork on.

   

Tip! I learned the hard way to number the clothespins so it is easier to find the two pins that will hold one piece of paper– Number One pin on the left aligns with Number One pin on right, Two with Two, etc. Without the numbers, I wasn't clipping corresponding clothespins and was losing hanging capacity with skipped pins.




I keep my "drying rack" hanging from the cabinet above my sink. This is particularly handy because any paint drips go right into the sink.... paint drips? Did I say paint drips? Naw, there aren't ever any paint drips... If we use bigger paper, I attach the clothespins on the short side of the paper, as opposed to the long top side shown in the photo. This particular basket has enough grid wires to allow for eight paintings to hang at once. If the paper is not completely soggy too big, another painting can lay down in the basket itself. That is usually about as many paintings as we can produce in a day.

Idea! On this particular day my kiddos were doing science art and I only gave them primary colors of red, blue, and yellow on their pallets. Their assignment was to mix the paints to make the secondary colors of purple, green, and orange... SOME got it, though we had quite a few mucky browns, too... practice will make them color experts..

  

The cabinet door has to stay open slightly to allow for the basket brackets to slide onto the shelf– as you see it is barely noticeable.

When empty the rack is pretty unobtrusive, so I leave it out all the time. With space at a premium in my new classroom, necessity really WAS the mother of invention for this hack! I give it a double thumbs up! Whoot! Maybe it will work in your classroom, too!

Click on back to Five for Friday for more tips!

So glad you stopped by! Sorry I've been awol for a while– change of classroom and new program really beat my bum this season! See you next week, I hope!

p.s.  Whatcha' think of the new winking Kath? Hee.