Back to School Crafts: Trick Out Your Supplies!

Photo by Dane Tashima

New school supplies always helped to soften my childhood back-to-school blues. I loved decorating my pristine new notebooks, binders, and folders with stickers, doodles, and tape. In that spirit, I created some back-to-school crafts for Parents magazine! In the photo above are some fruit-themed items: tape and marker-decorated folders, stamped pencil cases, and washi tape-covered pencils. Super easy! Here are some of the fun items I used:
- Mint green duct tape (for watermelon rind on folder)
- plain white pencils to cover
- mixed fruit washi tape, strawberry washi tape, watermelon washi tape, tiny watermelons washi tape
- blue and yellow zipper blank pencil cases, pink zipper blank pencil case

Photo by Dane Tashima

Make a felt narwhal pocket for your notebook (template here), custom fish erasers, and magnetic mermaid and shark clips to organize your papers!
- eraser clay: here and here

Photo by Dane Tashima

For the outer space-obsessed kid: galaxy pencil cases, star and planet crayons, and moon bookmarks!
- transluscent, white, and silver polymer clay for bookmarks
- blank black pencil cases
- moon stickers!

The pencil cases were my favorite. I want to stamp everything I own!

I used these white erasers to make the stamps. Instructions here.

You can dot the seeds on with paint or a black sharpie.

Some of my lemon tests!

Click here for mermaid instructions!

These are fun, easy, and pretty hard to mess up! Instructions here. Tip: test your white paint star-splatting on a scrap paper before you top off your colored galaxy-painting.

I made some planet bookmark clips as well as the moon clips. Instructions here.
Happy crafting! I hope everyone’s school year is off to a great start!