Today's Shoebox contributions both came from young viewers, 11-year-old April Toulouse of Texas and 15-year-old Monica Majardo of New Jersey.
April's suggestion did not come through the mail; however, as she personally handed me the decorative pens she had made when I was making an appearance at a Michael's store in Southlake, Texas. The pens were like those we did on show CDS-643 some months ago, but April had personalized hers. Instead of wrapping the pens in decorative or metallic paper, she had used plain white paper and stickers (figure A). One pen was covered generously with little flower stickers and the other had my name on it in sticker letters. Then the pens were wrapped in double-sided tape or sheets cut to fit (figure B) and covered with those tiny little holeless beads (figure C). Perhaps this is an idea that you have made before or seen before, but it was new to me and I thought that the personalization was a terrific idea. She was also a very neat in her crafting!
Monica offered the suggestion to use colored electrical tape to decorate various items...especially anything that needs a border (figure D). She also mentioned that the tape comes in more colors than I had realized. No longer is it just black, but red, blue, yellow, green and orange. At least those were the colors I found at my hardware store. Monica sent in several cards with examples of how the tape can be cut and/or punched and applied (figure E). She decorated the paper she wrote on with a punched-out border strip across both the top and bottom of the page (figure F) and said that one of the first items she decorated was her black cello case. Now it is not only not as boring looking as it once was but she can tell it apart from her fellow cello players' look-alike cases.
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