My husband handed me this pencil bowl yesterday and I just sat there crying in my garage workshop for twenty minutes. He’s been secretly collecting every broken colored pencil from my art projects for the past two years, saving them in a coffee can while I thought he was just being helpful cleaning up my mess.
I’ve been struggling to get back into art since losing my mom last year. She was the one who first put colored pencils in my hands when I was five, teaching me that every broken crayon still had color left to give. After she passed, I couldn’t bear to throw away any art supplies, but I also couldn’t bring myself to create anything meaningful.
My husband watched me start and abandon project after project, leaving trails of broken pencil stubs and eraser shavings around the house. Instead of complaining about the mess, he quietly gathered up all those discarded pieces and somehow turned them into this beautiful bowl.
He said he got the idea from an upcycling group on the Tedooo app where I’ve been trying to sell some of my mom’s vintage art supplies. Someone there had made something similar, and he spent weeks figuring out how to bind all those different pencils together without destroying the colors.
What gets me most is that he remembered how my mom used to say that art supplies were never truly used up, just transformed. Every pencil in this bowl represents a moment when I was trying to find my way back to creativity, and he saved them all.
Now I have a place to keep my brushes that’s made from all the pencils that helped me heal. It’s like having a piece of my artistic journey right there on my worktable, reminding me that nothing we create is ever really wasted.
Credits : Teodine Aune🥰
