Sea anemone-esque piece made from toilet paper rolls

Sea anemone-esque piece made from toilet paper rolls

Following up from last week’s cardboard toilet paper roll project, I decided to try experimenting with cut texture and a bit of paint on a few of the rolls. It was fun!

Back of the toilet paper roll wall piece

Back of the piece

To me, the result resembles fruit from the sweetgum tree, a sea anemone, or some sort of sun-dried daisy bouquet. I’d like to create an entire wall of these, and cut them at different heights to create a bit of a rolling effect. It’d also be fun to paint these with more aquatic hues and put these on the floor as an installation, since they do look a bit like tide pool creatures.

I decided to keep the size of this project small to start out with, so I only used nine TP tubes. I used a cheap sponge brush to paint their interior with some copper-colored acrylic paint I had lying around. (It’s  much easier to use a sponge brush, rather than a bristled brush, to paint the inside of the tubes.)

After the paint dried, I used scissors to cut thin fringe about halfway up along the bottom of each tube. Then, I  turned the tubes fringe-side down so I could glue them together with craft glue, using clothespins to hold them in place.

Clothespins holding TP tubes together

Clothespins help the tubes stay together during the glue-drying process.

Once the glue dried, I flipped the tubes over, removed the clothespins, and used a pen to curl the fringe on each tube. At moments I felt like I was giving them an Ogilve home perm.

Closeup of the finished piece.

Closeup of the finished piece.

I’m looking forward to making many more of these and experimenting with scale. I also think they’d be fun to use as texture for a large sweetgum ball-inspired papier-mâché sculpture.

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