We asked our good friend, Jenny, to write an entry about her very clever idea for organizing dress-up clothes:

Whenever anyone asked my daughter what she wanted for Christmas this year, they got exactly the same answer - “dress-up clothes, a baby care center, and games”. We already had some of the big Disney princess dresses, and since more would be coming, I knew I had to work out a better solution for storage than what we had (laying them on top of a bookshelf…). I also wanted it to be appealing and special, since this was the top item on her Christmas list.

I’d gotten an idea from the dress-up area at Johnny’s Toys - they have cubbies where the clothes are hung on pegs, with space for shoes on shelves above or to the side. I searched online, but I couldn’t find anything like it. It was time to get creative. In our basement, we have four bookshelves for toy storage. Two of them are a good size and configuration to store toys, games, and puzzles. The other two are … not so great for that. So I thought about it and decided with some rearranging, toy donation, and refresh of toys at Nana’s, I could free up those two bookcases for dress-up storage (after all, they already contained two bins full of the accessories). I took all of the shelves out of one and installed a tension rod for hanging the dresses instead. I put the maximum number of shelves in the other one and used it for storage of shoes, wands, purses, and crowns. The bins for some of the accessories will eventually have princess stickers or something on the sides for the finishing touches, but I haven’t gotten to that yet. The drawers hold extras, wands, and jewelry. We moved these bookshelves side by side, and added a mirror on the pole next to one for the ultimate in kiddie dress-up fun. Now everything is neat, organized, and on display - a very enticing play area!