Hanging Clothes

Over the years I have tried various methods to store the dress-up clothes in the playroom.  Bins seem to be the easiest for the children to use to put the clothes away but they have other issues.  Bins take up a lot of space - something we don't have a lot of.  Smaller children have difficulty reaching to the bottom of the bin and it is often difficult to see/find the item you want when all the clothes are jumbled together in a bin.

I have occasionally used hooks to hang the blankets and dress-up clothes but found plastic hooks often break and metal ones sometime get caught on the fabric and tear the clothes.  I also have some safety concerns about using hooks especially around infants and toddlers.

So, most often I have used hangers to store the dress up clothes;

 

All the children can easily see the selection and pull it off the hanger.  However, putting the clothes back on the hangers was a frustrating - sometimes impossible - task for the little ones.  The hangers were a favourite toy for many of the children who used them for everything except hanging clothes;

Which of course meant the dress-up clothes were always left strewn on the floor.  Then the older children and/or I would be tasked with hanging everything up over and over again resulting in a lot of grumbling.

Recently I bought a new hanger from Ikea and it has been working very well.

There are no sharp pointy parts.  The hoops are accessible for children of all ages/sizes. The items are displayed to it is easy to find the one you want.  Even if all the clothes get taken out it does not take long to put them all away again.  The only problem we sometimes have is that the children tend to use the top hoops first thereby covering the lower hoops and making it more difficult to hang clothes on them. 

Overall everyone is quite pleased with this new clothes hanger.  There are far fewer complaints about hanging up the dress-up clothes now.  In fact, many of the children use this new hanger for everything. 

Since puppets and stuffed animals so often get hung up here too I've now got another hanger - I just have to find a good location to put it.