Paper Sticks of Rock, or Beach-Themed Party Favours

Recently I made a beach-themed window display for a charity shop. No British seaside resort is complete without sticks of rock, so I made these fake ones out of paper!

These would also make cute party favours if filled with little sweets, or an addition to beach-themed décor.

Read on for how to put them together (it really is as simple as you think)

You’ll need:

Striped paper bag (or paper)

Scrap white card

Clear tape

Glue stick (Pritt Stick or similar)

Red pen

Cellophane

Ruler

Scissors/craft knife

A cylinder to wrap card around (should be roughly the diameter you want the rock to be--I used a tube of lip stain!)

1. Cut card into long rectangles, length x circumference you want, plus 1cm overlap, e.g. 20x6cm (should wrap around the cylinder!)

Cut striped paper slightly bigger than this e.g. 20x6.5cm.

2. Roll each piece of card lengthways around the cylinder to make a tube, and tape the long edge down well. It doesn’t matter if this bit looks messy because it won’t be seen!

3. For the rock ‘ends’, use more white card and draw around the end of your cylinder twice as many times as sticks of rock you’re making (two for each stick of rock). Give each circle ‘legs’ at the four compass points.

4. Cut these out, decorate with the word or design you want, and bend the legs back. Glue to the ends of each tube of card, with the legs on the outside.

5. Glue along each striped paper pieces (on the wrong side) and gently roll onto the card tubes.

6. Cut some cellophane longer than the sticks of rock and roughly the width you cut for the striped paper. Wrap around rock and secure with a tiny piece of tape. Twist the ends to close, adding a narrow strip of tape over the top if it won’t stay (I had problems with this, then remembered the reams of sticky tape I had to remove from the wrapping of my last real stick of rock)

7. Display, but don’t eat ;)

Where to get cellophane (because I had to look it up)
Ebay/Amazon/etc if you want tonnes of it
A local florist if you only want a little piece. My nearest florist kindly let me have a sheet for free, so combined with the old paper bag and scrap card, this DIY cost me little more than some tape, glue, ink and time :)


Will be linking up at various link parties listed under the button at the top of the page (eventually I'll get around to reconstructing the section that used to be at the bottom...)

I may write about this window display on my other blog, Doing A Thing. Here you'll also find posts about chocolate, days out, art and more chocolate ;)