Rainbow pencil holders

Here are the details of the rainbow pencil holders for my classroom...the idea came from this article in the NZ Herald Sunday magazine by Greig Morgan back in January I think. I loved the rainbow idea as my classroom is going to have a bit of a rainbow theme (hopefully without being OTT as the rainbow theme can look fun or look too much if you know what I mean!) 

My hubby got a piece of the wood below from Bunnings- it's about 50mm wide and was about 150mm long- I can just read from the article that it's called dress gauge pine. He cut out the rainbow shapes after using a plate to draw the circle shape on the wood.

Then he used the electric sander to soften the edges.

 

Next he painted them with a coat of undercoat and drilled the holes for the pencils. He forgot to not drill the holes too deep though so I'm going to have to put something in the holes or once the kids sharpen their pencils a few times their pencils will be lost down the holes! (in the article it says to wrap a piece of tape around your drill bit so you know when to stop drilling down). Then I painted them the rainbow stripes. Next time I would definitely use paint test pots to do this as I used kids acrylic paint so each rainbow stripe needed A LOT of coats- took forever!!

When they were dry I painted on a layer of modpodge to seal them - varnish would work the same.

This would be a fun school holiday project too if you have older kids...dad (or mum!) cuts the shape out and the kids can paint them- a cute desk accessory for their bedroom :)

Megan x