Pencil Stand for Kids

Do you also fail horribly when you try to convince your kids to have their room tidy and organized? No worries, most of us do. However, I am never going to stop trying and every now and then I come up with an idea to make things better. This time me and the girls were making caterpillar pencil stands. They are made from toilet paper rolls so we not only enjoyed some creative time together, we also recycled a bit.

It will come as no shock when I say that children value more those thing that they had to make themselves or work for. And so I hope that Lily will use her stand and take good care of it. Amelia helped by providing the cultural program (we heard a deeply felt and very loud “Let It Go” from Frozen about fifteen times including the dance) and then she went to put some glue and glitter on her face.

- 5 toilet paper rolls

- color paper (2 DIN A4 sheets to cover the rolls and more colors for the decoration)

- glue

- scissors

- ruler

- pencil

- anything you wish to use for decoration: crayons and paint, glitter, stamps, paper cutters, wooden decoration…

First cut rectangles from paper that will cover the rolls – their height should equal the height of a roll and the width should be the circumference of the roll + 1 cm.

Put some glue on one of the shorter sides of the rectangle and place it on a roll. (pictures 1 and 2)

Wrap the paper around the roll, put some glue on the other short end of the paper and glue to the roll. Do the same with the remaining rolls. (pictures 3 and 4)

Now glue the rolls together in one line. Put a stripe of glue on one roll and join with another roll. I recommend to put the glue on the paper overlap, this way the overlap will hide nicely. (picture 5)

A caterpillar needs eyes, therefore, we cut out some circles, drew eyes and glued them onto the first roll in the line. (picture 1 and 2)

A caterpillar also needs a mouth so draw it or cut it out and glue it. (picture 3)

If your caterpillar is to have antennas like our caterpillars, cut out two thin paper stripes, glue some decoration on one end (we used wavy circular paper cutouts) and glue the other end in the paper roll. (pictures 4 and 5)

Decorate the rest of the body, I started with circle cutouts of different colors. (picture 6)

And continued with flowers, grass and a ladybug. I made the grass using wavy scissors and paper cutouts to create the flowers. The ladybug is a wooden decoration. (pictures 7 and 8)

Caterpillar done, now convince your kids to use it to keep their craft supplies organized.