Toilet Roll Castle Desk Tidy – Easy Kids Crafts!

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Welcome back to this week’s Kids Crafty! If you know our house, you will know that we have pots of pencils and pens and crayons and scissors and all sorts floating around all the time. Tidy it is not. And if we need to clear a surface we need move LOTS of things. So we decided it was about time of a TP Roll Castle desk tidy! And not any desk tidy – but a toilet roll desk tidy (why of course! Our favourite craft material)!!! A perfect Back to School craft too. Get your kid’s tables sorted! And who doesn’t love a clever Toilet Roll Upcycle?! Right?

back to school
Finished desk tidy, first shared in August 2012

We started off relatively simple and then got a bit carried away – the little boat is for some Peanut People we made, but you could also use it hold erasers and pencil sharpeners. The trees are there, so that you can add sheets or paper/ letters of postcards between the castle and the trees. Perfect.

Materials to make a TP Roll Castle Desk Tidy:

  • 7 Toilet rolls (3 cut in half),
  • acrylic paint,
  • extra bits of card for trees, boat and door,
  • paint,
  • a shoe box lid (a piece of card would be ok too, but the lid has the added bonus of having a rim, which means things will not roll out of it)

How to make a TP Roll Desk Tidy

We intended to paint the castle red. But I had run out of red. So this shiny pinky/red it was!

back to shool craft
TP Rolls stacked for the desk tidy

1) Cut your loo rolls to shape. And decide on the basic lay out for your castle.

toddler painting
Toddler painting a TP Roll

2) Paint your loo rolls. Wear old clothes, acrylics do stain.

3) Cut out any extras such as trees and paint. Again, I cut, the kids painted..

4) Let dry.

5) Glue in place. Now we used a hot glue gun, as I have many a child hood memory of things like this falling apart and being VERY annoying. So either use VERY GOOD PVA glue, supported by a bit of masking tape (that you can paint over) or a hot glue gun! The trees are glued to the rim of the shoe-box lid.

6) I then cut out little extras like the boat and the draw bridge and we stuck it all in place.

Castle Desk Tidy - perfect for back to school

And here full of pens!

(PS the Knights are a little preview from our my Kids Craft Book!)

Fancy some more Back to School Ideas?

back to school crafts