DIY Paper Roll Pencil Cup

Hi Giggles Galore Readers! This is Cathy once again from Party HarDIY. I’ve got the perfect end of summer craft that you can make with your kids. The best part is that it’s practically free and it uses something we all have tons of in our house – paper rolls! I love this craft because it recycles something that tends to end up in the garbage anyway. It’s always great to repurpose things when you can, especially something as common as a paper roll. This DIY Paper Roll Pencil Cup is perfect for your homework station, kids’ room or as a classroom gift for a new teacher. You can create it in any color scheme you’d like but I always prefer a pastel rainbow.

You will need:

2 paper towel roll
2 toilet paper rolls
Acrylic paint in your choice of colors
Light pink paint
Silver washi tape
Light pink cardstock
Pink colored pencil
Glue gun

Directions:

Gather up all your supplies including the pens or pencils that you will be putting in your holder. To ensure the correct height of your cups, measure your pen or pencil against the paper roll. Then, mark where you’ll be cutting it.

Once you’ve marked your height, grab your X-Acto knife and make a slit in your paper roll. From there you can either cut all the way around with your X-Acto knife or grab a scissor and go the rest of the way

The next step is to straighten the edge that you cut. I recommend placing it down on your table and swirling around with your scissor as straight as you can.

Once all your rolls have been cut, you’re going to start painting! Paint your paper rolls from the top to 3/4 of the way down and leave a space at the bottom for where you’ll be painting your eraser. You don’t need to worry about this line being straight because you’re covering it with the washi tape. However, you will want to make sure that the paint doesn’t “fade” because then it will provide an uneven edge for your tape.

Once you’ve painted the outside of your paper rolls, you want to paint the inside just a little bit at the top. We do this so that you don’t see the color of the paper roll when you’re looking at it from the top. Once you’re done, place it to dry by placing the rollover an acrylic paint tube, that way it won’t fall over. Repeat this with all your rolls and all your colors.

One they’re fully dry, it’s time to add the eraser! Start by painting a pink line at the bottom of your roll. Remember, you don’t need to worry about the edge being straight because we’re going to cover it with our silver tape. You will, however, want to make sure that the gap in between isn’t too large.

Take your washi tape and measure the correct length by wrapping it around your paper roll. Cut a strip that’s long enough to go around with a little bit extra. Repeat for a second piece and then you can use this to cut all the rest of the pieces for all your paper rolls.

Then, you’ll want to find the imperfect side of your paper roll. This would be any part that has uneven edges or leftover paper towel bits or anything like that. Wrap your tape around with this imperfect side being the seam of where your tape meets. Then place the second piece of tape slightly overlapping the first piece so that there isn’t a gap where the seam is. Repeat for all of your paper rolls.

If you want to, you can add small details your pencils like a number 2 sign. Alternatively, you can add your child’s name if you wish or their teacher’s name. I would recommend doing this before gluing it all together, just in case something happens and you need to replace one of the rolls. It’ll be much easier to do that before it’s glued in place!

Now that you have all your rolls together, it’s time to glue to them! The first step is to arrange them in the size order you want them to be. I recommend keeping the smaller sizes, which is probably your toilet paper rolls, in the front with the larger ones mixed in between. The important thing to remember is that we want it to look good from the front and the back. Therefore, we are going to take our imperfect edges and point them all towards the inside a.k.a. center of your pen cup. Once you’ve got the arrangement you like, you can start gluing!

To glue it, it’s really simple. Just grab a glue gun or maybe even just Elmer’s glue if you wanted. Make a strip of glue on the side where the two paper rolls will be touching, place them together and hold them until the glue dries. Repeat this for all of your paper rolls. There may be some spots where the rolls connect in more than one spot. If you’d like, you can add some extra glue there. However, I would recommend being careful. When I did this, there was some glue on the side of my glue gun that ended up on the front of my paper roll. So, do that at your own risk or very carefully!

Once all of your rolls are glued together, we are going to create the base for the pen cup. Grab a piece of pink paper that matches the pink that we used for the eraser paint and a pink colored pencil so the line blends in really well. Very carefully and very lightly trace around your shape. You want to be sure to mark all the spots where there is an indent and label one color so that you know which direction the base will go.

Then going section by section, place a little bit of glue on the bottom of your paper rolls and glue it onto your base.

Now your paper roll pen cup holder is complete! Grab your pens, pencils, and any other supplies and just pop them in! I love rainbows and everything being color-coordinated, so I separated everything by color which made it look really cute.

This would also be a great teacher gift if you filled it up with some basic supplies. It would be perfect with pens, as well as markers for grading papers and spare pencils for their students.