Hello Wednesday, how are you?

Cleanish desk over here...the floor is another matter. Here you can see a cup of tea, my new ipod docking station(playing Romanian music as I type) and in the background is my new pencil box.

Warning, the rest of this post is photofull...but do feel free to stick around and look through them if you want to know how I made my pencil box, and more importantly why!



I have quite a few prisma pencils, also some karisma pencils, which are the uk equivalents. I have had the karisma for years and years, and sadly they are very hard to find now, so to complete the set I am having to mix them with prismas...this is bad enough...( I don't like that they aren't all the same style/shape)

but they were all in boxes in drawers, then to make life easier, so I thought, they were all put in one big box.

This resulted in lots of rattling, mainly by me, scrabbling around for the right colour, which is usually always at the bottom...I craft late at night, into the early hours...scrabbling and rattling at 4am is not advised. I generally hear lots of hmmphing and sighing and turning over from Ian in the next room.

So I got a few toilet roll inners, separated the pencils into colour groups and stood them up in the box. this was great , as in I could see all the colours, no more scrabbling...but bad, in that the box was a bit big and every time I so much as looked at it, all the rolls fell over, rather drunkenly!

PLUS...and this is where I give you far too much info about myself, the cardboard rolls were all from different brands of loo paper, and so were all different sizes. See next photo...



You cannot begin to imagine how much this annoyed me...this brings us back to liking things in sets!!!

So, firstly I unwrapped 2 rolls of Ikea wrapping paper, carefully rewrapping the paper onto a third roll, which incidentally is now huuuge! This gave me 2 long, white ,sturdy tubes. I cut them up into same size sections, immediately I felt much better lol I filled them with pencils and facebooked about how I had just spent an hour sorting pencils...I need to get out more!

It gets worse!



The box, if you remember was too big, so i hunted out a smaller box. This meant displacing some
silk dyes and glass paints, which I chucked into another box. I dare say they will lurch around drunkenly now, but they are in a cupboard so I won't see it happening.

I had to arrange the rolls in the box so they made a pleasing pattern...and not be higgeldy piggeldy, cos that would have driven me nuts...I know,I know!

Then I covered the box in this scrummy paper from Art from the Heart. at this point it is looking like a badly wrapped xmas present.



The box is slightly longer than 6 inches, so I was left with a gap at each corner.

I cut these strips, taking a snippet out from each end...



So they would bend over the box ends and fold over themselves.



I did this on all 4 corners and then covered the base of the box.

next I painted the rolls in the colour groups of my pencils. You could cover them in paper, but really hardly any of the rolls will be seen later...and besides it was an excuse to get painty. I suggest if you have small children that you get them to do this, it will keep them quiet for ages...worked for me, I have never been so quiet!



I painted a little of the insides, but only about a quarter of the way down.

next I got a couple of really strong brads, these are especially good as they have the little discs that slip over the legs before you open them out.

I cut a piece of brown webbing, about 50cm long, folded over the ends and bradded them to the box.

I popped some glue onto the bottom rim of each tube and pushed them down into the box, holding them in place for a few minutes till they started to set.

and finally filled it all up with pencils...

The handle swivels on the brads so you can move it out of the way.

No more rattling or scrabbling in the dead of night, all pencils are sorted into colour order...phew! and the whole thing looks quite pretty, almost makes up for them not being a complete set lol