easy homemade stamped pencils: plain pencils go from boring to BAM!

It’s hard to find ways to send our littles off to school with a bit of love once they become tweens.

So these easy homemade stamped pencils are a super-easy way to make plain pencils go from boring to BAM! (channel your inner Emeril), and they also are a great way to send kids off to the wilds of the week with a little love.

Tweens may feel ready to walk to school or the bus stop with their buddies—sans parents.

Tweens may feel ready to pack their own lunches without Mom or Dad’s help.

Tweens may feel it’s too intrusive for family to write notes in their planners or agenda books.

Tweens may feel too rushed to read notes during lunch or snack.

So when I saw these DIY Personalized Stamped pencils from my friend Amy Allen Clark of MomAdvice.com, I was over the moon.

I loved how simple these stamped pencils were and how easy they were to make. I loved how they added a really inexpensive bit o’ flair to an otherwise boring school supply.

And I loved that by creating a few stamped pencils for our kids allowed me to send them to school with just a little bit of extra love from home.

All you need are a few things to make these personalized pencils, and honestly, once you have the supplies, I really think you can do a ton of cool things with them.

Here’s the skinny. . .

Easy Homemade Stamped Pencils: Plain Pencils from Boring to BAM!

I love that these are a little way to slip a note of encouragement to my kids during the day. It’s so fun, and you don’t need a whole lot to make them.

All you need for these pencils is:

• metal stamp set: I bought 3mm lowercase newsprint stamps and would love to treat myself to the 3mm uppercase newsprint stamps next, but I also love the Bridgette 3mm letter stamps as well (they’re more like handwritten font).
• small metal heart stamp: A teeny heart stamp makes everything just a little more fun, right?
• small jeweler’s hammer: I bought this small jeweler’s hammer just because it was easier for me to handle than the big one.
• regular, ole #2 pencils
• small stamp pad: I used a small blue ink pad, but you could probably use anything you have in the house.

Making these stamped pencils is super easy, and coming up with the words you want to stamp on them is really fun.

I wanted to do some pencils with the kids’ names on them, but I also wanted to include some words of encouragement for them. So these are the words I stamped on our pencils:

• name
• work hard
• just breathe
• learn
• have fun
• smile
• be kind
• you rock
• awesome kid
• love
• school rocks
• be you

I really kind of made them up as I went along, and it was easy. You really can’t go wrong. Just dive in and start stamping!

All you do to make these easy homemade stamped pencils is:

1. Choose the words you want stamped.
2. Place the pencil flat on the table, on top of a few magazines to ease the blow of the hammer and to protect your table or countertop.
3. Grab the letter stamp and place it on the ink pad.
4. Position the letter on the pencil and hit it with a few small taps.
5. Do the same thing with each letter until your message is stamped.
6. Wipe the pencil with a paper towel or napkin to get rid of the excess ink.

These, my friends, are not perfect. But you get the idea, and your pencils–I promise!–will improve with practice. \

My kids loved them. They really did.

And I loved watching them put the stamped pencils into their pencil cases as they prepared for the first day. So fun. So cute.

Huge and happy thanks to the amazing and talented Amy from Mom Advice for sharing her idea. She seriously rocks.

Need or want a few more ideas that may be helpful as you move into the new school year?

Click on the image below:

Want a little more back-to-school fun? A few more rockstar resources?

• Back to School Tips and Tricks: Make this year ROCK
• Get kids involved in back to school shopping
• school success
• everything I wish knew before middle school
• lunchbox notes: school RULES! lunchbox joke notes
• help kids start a blog
• analog twitter wall
• game design for kids
• get kids started with texting
• texting as a learning tool

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