*Tutorial* – Back to School Pencil Vase

Though I’d share a quick step-by-step of how I created the pencil vase that I made for my kids’ teachers for back to school week. I “discovered” this project on Pinterest, with photo credit given to this site. But she didn’t really provide any explanation or tips on how to make it, so I winged it, and I’m happy with how they turned out!

You can embellish these vases as much or as little as you want… I kept it pretty simple this go ’round.

Ok, so let’s get started…

You’ll need:

• Vase (make sure it’s not too much taller than the height of your pencils, and not too wide)
• Card stock (for stability, if your vase is concave like mine)
• Glue gun & lots of glue sticks
• Pencils (I only used 2 packs of 24, but that could change depending on your vase’s width.)
• Ribbon, buttons, twine, etc to embellish

1. Gather your supplies (listed above) ahead of time. You may want to take your pencils out of the box so they’re easy to get to when you’re hot gluing them down.

2. If you have a concave vase, you’ll need to wrap it in card stock to give your pencils something to stick to. Cut your card stock to a height appropriate for your vase, and wrap it completely around your vase. It may take multiple sheet of card stock to cover your vase – I used 2 sheets cut at 6″x12″.

3. From here it’s downhill. Begin gluing your pencils to the side of your vase (or the card stock covering your vase). Make sure to do this with the vase standing on a flat surface, as opposed to laying it down on its side. This helps ensure your pencils are standing completely straight and upright.

4. After you get a few of them glued down, step back and assess your progress. This is when I noticed that I should’ve made my card stock piece a little taller so that the “hole” at the top of it would be wider. Since I didn’t do this, my pencils sort of sloped inward at the top of the vase, leaving more space between them toward the bottom of the vase. This type of imperfection bugs me to pieces, but I’m learning to let things go. It doesn’t look that bad, especially from far away…and who’s really going to inspect the spacing of my pencils in a classroom full of 3 yr olds anyway, right? lol…

5. So here we have the fully covered vase. Minor spacing issues and all, lol… Easy right?!

6. And then I just wrapped the vase in some twill and twine that I had on hand. A simple bow does the trick here.

7. You’ll want to be sure to secure your bow and embellishments to the vase, so that they don’t slip around when being transported and used.

8. Top your bow off with a cute button and you’re good to go!

This is such a quick and easy project, and I can’t say that enough! The kids played and colored as I was doing this, and it took all of 20 minutes, maybe. I can’t make a card that quickly! Lol…

Thanks again for letting me share with you!

Have a good one!

No related posts.