Upcycle: Personalized Frilled Rainbow Pencils

Inspired by the DIY Frilled pencils @ Maya made blog, we created our own personalized Rainbow pencils.

For Valentine's day, we made these beautiful rainbow pencils for CJ Teachers. The teachers bring them up in flying colors, so we presented Rainbow pencil to brighten their day. When we completed a set of rainbow pencils, I was totally obsessed by the frills. We created lots of them to go with the valentine swap cards for kids.

Now days we are using these frilled pencils for grocery lists, To-do lists. While writing the shaking of frills and the vibrant colors make be so happy. CJ also loves the rainbow colors and the frills. Delights an early writer too.. She practices Rainbow colors with the pencil saying Red, Orange, yellow, green, blue, Indigo and Violet.



The advantage of creating the rainbow pencil with kids is it's an easy way to teach them the colors of the Rainbow and the order of the occurrence. A fun filled and exciting project.

Materials Used:

Pencils
Tissue paper(in Rainbow colors) or Rainbow color crepe paper
Glue
Paint Brush
Flat Styrofoam vegetable container(For Mixing Mod-podge)
Mod-Podge or Glue stick
Measuring Scale or Ruler
Child safe Scissors
Fringe Scissors(Optional)

Steps Overview:

Measure the length of your pencil. We used pencil with erasers. The length of the pencil excluding the eraser was 7 inches.

Since our pencil measured 7 inches. We used 1 inch wide strips. The length of the strip depends on how u want the pencil to look. I used 6 inches long strip. So the pencil looks little thicker than the actual one. Start tearing strips of tissue papers.



If only I had known about the below product - Rainbow crepe paper strips, I could have saved time spent in cutting the strips. But anyways using strips of tissue paper is a fun way to use bits and scraps of them. If you have lots of scraps of tissue paper, they can be recycled this way.

I wanted to check how Mod-podge and glue stick work for this project. So we used two methods to wrap the paper around the pencil

Method 1: Glue stick
Apply glue stick to the length of the paper


Wrap the glued paper around the pencil


Method 2: Mod Podge
Thin Mod podge by mixing a small portion of it with water in a Styrofoam container. Start from the free end of the pencil, Apply mod podge mixture to a small portion of the pencil. Take the paper strip and start wrapping. Apply mod-podge as and when required.


Wrap and glue the different colored strips in the pattern of rainbow colors.

Let it dry

Optional- When the pencil was dry, I coated a layer of Gloss-luster Mod-Podge to give a shiny finish to the pencil

PS: The Mod-podged pencil was easy to sharpen compared to the glued pencil

For the Frilled topper:

Use coordinating color of paper for the frills. Cut a strip of tissue paper/gift wrap paper,6 X 8.

Fold the paper in half as shown below.


Fold the paper in accordion fold


Cut fringes along one side(the free side or unfolded side) with normal scissors or use fringing scissors I have shown in the materials used. Unfold the accordion fold.


Apply glue to the non-fringe side of the frill


Wrap the glued frill around the eraser side of the pencil leaving the eraser hidden but available.


Let the frill dry.



We also made a Music notes pencil:-)


Frills, Frills


So Vibrant! With St. Patrick's Day coming up next month, the rainbow pencils may be a perfect Rainbow craft for St. Patrick's Day.