💈Miniature Barber's Pole Made From Recycled Materials💈

Paper straws are awful. The may be good for the environment but they ruin the taste of your drink and disintegrate in seconds. So.. I found a use for them and that is miniature barbershop signs! If you want to add more detail to a diorama or model this is a low budget and easy way to do it.

The materials for this project are different and depend on the way you want your miniature to look. What I used is:

Tools:

1. Hot glue gun and sticks
2. Double sided tape
3. Sellotape -I used this to make the paper more ✨shiny✨
4. Scissors
5. Red marker -to make the red stripe

Recycled:

1. Paper straw (the whole idea came from this)
2. Aluminum foil or Condensed milk capsule
3. Paper clip -I even tried a gold one!

For the ends I found out that some screws and air dry clay would do the job.

I also made a hanging one with the hot glue.

For the first step you need to cut the paper straw in small pieces. Make sure that those are not too big or too small

-you can also try different sizes to fit your build perfectly!

The with the marker draw the stripe that's missing or both of them if your straw is blank.

After that cut a piece of tinfoil or the capsule and stick it on the double sided tape. Then cut thin strips of that.

You can then glue the strips on the two edges of the paper straw to make the "metal" framing of the sign.

-in the last image the 2 are finished but I didn't have a single image for this step

For the end caps you can just hot glue 2 screws or any metal part but if you want to make something more interesting you can make them out of air dry clay. You can also make a hanging one using hot glue. Just heat the hot glue with a lighter and glue the stick at the end of the straw. Then pull the stick and it should look like the image above.

Add the sellotape to make the sign look ✨shiny✨. Now you just need to cut the paperclip and glue it to the paper straw to make a base and your barber shop pole is ready! You can now use this in your projects to add detail.

I hope this instructable was helpful to you.

While doing this project I found some really interesting information too:

here is a ted-ed video that explains what barber shop poles mean -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGPPy__YnrI

and if you want to hate more paper straws this video says that plastic straws are actually not a problem -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiWFF_2IVHc