Do you always find yourself losing pens and pencils? This DIY rainbow caterpillar pen holder is a great way to store some of your craft supplies, and it’s eco-friendly too!
So dig through the recycling bin, grab some toilet roll tubes, and get ready to repurpose them into one of the coolest stationery crafts around.Pen
What You’ll Need
Method
1. Hold your toilet roll tube vertically at the bottom of one of your pieces of paper, and using a marker, mark where the tube ends. Do the same on the other side.
2. Draw a line with a ruler, joining the two marks, then cut off any excess, so that your piece of paper is the exact height as your tube.
3. Use this piece of paper as a guide to cut your remaining pieces of colored paper for your rainbow colors.
4. Glue each different colored piece of paper around the outside of the tube, making sure to cut off any excess left over from wrapping it around the tube.
5. Try to wrap the paper as tightly as possible so that there are no creases or air bubbles. Keep wrapping until the whole tube is covered.
6. Now you’ll need to draw your caterpillar legs on the colored paper. Make the shape similar to a capital L, like a bubble letter, so your pen holder can stand up (don’t make the legs too big!).
7. When you’re satisfied with the shape, cut it out and use it as a pattern for the rest of the legs by drawing around it like a stencil on the other pieces of colored paper left over.
8. Cut out however many legs you need. To figure out how many legs you need, just double the number of tubes you have chosen.
9. Glue the corresponding color of each pair of legs to each color tube. For example, glue red legs to the red tube.
10. Next, cut out the caterpillar head. This is just going to be a circle with two antennae poking out of the top. You’ll need to put this at the top of the first toilet roll.
11. Draw the caterpillar’s mouth with the marker and glue the googly eyes onto the head.
12. Glue the head to the top of your tube. You can glue the head to whatever color you want the first tube to be.
13. Now it’s time to combine the tubes. Draw a line of glue down each of the tubes and press them together firmly in the color order that you want but make sure the head is at the front. To be sure they’ll stick, pin them together with clothes pegs at the top and bottom where the glue has been added until the glue is fully dry.
14. You could stop here but note that there would be no bottom to these holders, so the pens will fall out if you lift the tubes at any point.
15. If you want to take the extra step, sketch out the bottom of the caterpillar on a larger piece of cardboard (a cereal box would work great) and then glue the cardboard at the bottom of the tubes.
16. Add any other decorations to make it completely unique to you!
There are so many creative possibilities when crafting pen holders, you could make either a pocket pen holder, a notebook pen holder, a wooden pen holder, or even a leather pen holder.
You could also try your hands at a different craft like these Alice in Wonderland card soldiers, or play around with the layout of the tubes and make a castle.
FAQs
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