Storage solutions are made cheap easy with this acrylic paint pen roll. All that you will need to get started is a strip of material sourced from an old tablecloth, sheet or even a shirt! A light colour will work best!
Tools required to make a pen roll:
- Life of Colour Paint Pens (any preferred colours)
- Piece of fabric of 30x60cm approximately
- Strip of ribbon
- Scissors
- Iron
- Baking paper
- Sewing machine or needle and thread
- Lead pencil for marking
- Ruler or measuring tape
Step 1: Cut and paint material
A strip of material around 30x60cm will make a good sized pen roll to fit your favourite Life of Colour acrylic paint pens in.
Choose a funky design to paint onto your material. Patterns of a few images repeated very which way look effective. If you are having trouble deciding upon a design, google “fabric images” for inspiration.
Allow to dry and iron the reverse side in between two layers of baking paper to lock the colour into the fabric.
Step two: Edging
Double fold and iron the edges down to hide the frayed edges and use the sewing machine to sew around the whole rectangle. Try to keep the fold minimal to allow more material for the pen roll. Find a strip of ribbon around 40cm long and add some designs to it to make it match your material.
Step 3: Sew down the ends.
Place your pens onto the material at one end on the reverse side and fold down the top around 3cm and the bottom around 7cm to fit your pens in snuggly. Mark on the edge where the folds lie. Repeat this step for the other end of the material then see each end down to secure the material for the following step. Fold your piece of ribbon in half and attach it to one end along the middle.
Step 4: Sew pens spaces
In order to make sure your pens will fit into the spaces that you provide it’s a good idea to use the actual pens that you wish to store to measure the spaces. Sew the bottom and top layer down in a straight line to create a pocket space, I found that around a 8cm spacing is good pocket size to fit in 3x 3mm and 5x 1mm or 1.5mm Life of Colour paint markers.
Step 5: Fill it with pens and roll it up!
Fill the spaces with pens, roll it up and tie the ribbon up to secure the roll and you are ready to transport your pens to your next art project!
Whilst this is probably the easiest step so far I found it hard to choose which pens I wanted to store in it! I might just need to make another one so that I can take all my pens with me wherever I go.
Children love participating in art activities and painting using our Life of Colour paint pens and this is a perfect activity to do, you could even extend on the experience by making a tablecloth or a banner, so purchase some of our paint pens at bargain prices available in Australia and New Zealand to create a pen roll and some funky material together.
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