Make Your Own Pen Holder

I was feeling crafty the other day while I was cleaning up my son's crayons and pencils. Plus my inability to resist recycling things got the better of me, so I made our own pen (pencil or crayon) holder.

I know there are a lot of DIY guides for making pen holders, but I'm just damn proud of what I did.

I used an empty container of Gerber's Graduates puff snack for the pen holder body and my yarn scraps to decorate it. I didn't really put any thought on the color of the yarns that I used, I just grabbed a bunch from my stash and hoped that it will turn out okay. Aside from these recycled materials, I also used tape, hot glue, and a cutter.

Now on to the steps.

1. The most obvious step is to clean the container: wash it, let it dry, and peel off the label. 
2. Seal the cover onto the container with tape. I used masking tape for this.
3. Use tape to mark where you want to slice through the container. I chose to make my holders in two different heights, because I was gonna use it for crayons and for colored pencils. The purpose of the tape was to guide you so you can cut it straight. I, however, failed to keep it straight. 😂
4. Using a hot glue, wound the scrap of yarns onto the container.

Easy, right? I didn't put a design yet on the other pen holders that I made, but here's a picture of them together.

Make Your Own Origami Paper

My son loves to do origami. It was cute at first, we even encouraged him. But it came to a point where he's love for the art became wasteful. He depleted our supply of bond paper, his quiz pad for school, he even uses receipts to fold origami. So to solve this issue, we told him that he can only fold origami using a special origami paper, you know, the store-bought origami paper. The origami paper that we didn't have. Harharhar.

After MONTHS of nagging from our son, I finally told him that we'll make our own origami paper. So yesterday, that's what we did.

Materials:

1. Old magazine
2. Cutter

How to make a square:

This is just for those who doesn't know how to make a square out of a rectangular paper.

1. Fold one side of the paper in a triangle. Make sure that the ends are aligned.

2. Fold the excess rectangular strip of paper where the triangle ends.

3. Cut off the rectangular strip.

We made three different sizes to maximize the use of each page.

Large origami paper - use the whole page to make a square

Medium origami paper - cut the page in half and use each half to make a square

Small origami paper - use the excess rectangular strip for both the large and medium origami paper to make a square