What can you do with all those colored pencils that are on sale?

Make a cute vase, of course! I've seen a couple of these colored pencil vases on Pinterest. The one I read about was from Happy Clippings. I started with an empty soup can. Well, actually, I didn't have an empty one so I found one that was about to expire. Not too hard to do in my pantry since I don't cook very often. :)

I laid out 3 packages of colored pencils. I LOVE buying school supplies on sale at the end of the summer! I keep buying glue because it's so cheap and I don't even really use it in my class anymore. It's getting a little out of hand but school supplies are just one of those things that I love to buy. Anyway...first I matched all the colors from the 3 boxes. I had seen one vase online that was in no particular color order and I knew I would prefer mine in order.


Then I started putting them in order around the can using a rubberband. Some websites don't glue them to the can (or vase) so the teacher can use the pencils later. I'm just using this for decoration in my classroom so I glued them with E6000 glue. Just like with the post-it note frame last time, I could've used a glue gun but it's still at school.

Then I added a ribbon on top of the rubberband. On the Happy Clippings site, she had her daughter make a ribbon that looked like a ruler. It was very cute! I looked for a ruler ribbon already made but could only find a really thin one. I already had this red ribbon so it worked just fine!

Because this is going to be a year-round decoration for my classroom, I bought a fake set of flowers at Hobby Lobby on sale for about $3. But hey, I'm always open to real flowers...hint hint. :) This would make a super cute teacher appreciation gift with real flowers in it too.

This stem didn't really work the way it was, so I cut off each stem.

To me it seemed like there were too many leaves so I cut off a lot of those too. Looking back, if I had known I was going to cut off so many leaves, I probably could have left the stem in tact. Oh well, next time!

I used a piece of curly ribbon to tie the stems together so they wouldn't spread out too much in the can.



And voila.....a colorful vase to brighten up my classroom that only cost about $5 to make.