Pencil holder in a butterfly jar

How many empty jars do you have around the house?

What do you do with them?

I hold my paint brushes, pencils, pens, markers in jars. 

Do you know that thin, almost transparent paper that the shoes come wrapped in their boxes?  I found it when I upcycled the two shoe boxes into craft storage spaces.

I thought it would give my jars the look of frozen, sandblasted glass…so I started crafting.

A jar, the thin paper, paint brush and decoupage glue (Mod Podge) for ceramics (but any type of decoupage glue would have been OK, because I don’t plan on washing the jar, but only to wipe the dust off).

I cut a stripe of the paper as wide as the height of the jar, and long enough to roll it all over the jar. 

I coated the jar with a generous layer of decoupage glue and stuck the paper all around it, leaving some extra edge at the bottom of the jar. 

The good side was that I didn’t have to worry about creases and air bubbles…the more wrinkled the paper, the better. 

From here onwards I could have decorated the jar in a number of ways: either glue some twine or rope around the upper edge of the jar and another, around the middle, or  glue  some stripes of coloured fabric, or a border of burlap around it and then some lace on top of that and some twine…endless possibilities…

But since I recently bought two punches – butterfly and flower shaped, I was dying to use them. These punches are good for paper…so I needed some coloured paper, preferably a block colour that would match my house colour scheme… so I started searching through my boxes and drawers and I found a set of coloured CD envelopes. 

Who was ever going to use them? 

Not me. 

At least not for their original purpose.  

After having glued to my heart’s desire all the flowers and butterflies, I coated it with another layer of decoupage glue- to seal the paper- I was happy, so I made another one!

I think this would be a perfect activity to do with your kids. If you were to make with them these jars, but instead of butterflies, glue their favourite cartoon characters, can you imagine how much they’d like that? And maybe they’d be more motivated to keep their pens and pencils together.