Transforming My Old Junk

A while back, I explained that I wanted to bring new life to some old junk I had around the house.  The idea actually came to me from my cat, Shadow.  I know that makes me sound a little crazy silly but it was perfectly understandable when I wrote about it in this post.  I have been working on some of these small projects in between painting my foyer just to mix it up a bit.  So, here's my first junk transformation -

I wanted to give this old canister a more grown-up look.

I have had this for as long as I can remember.  And when the kids were little, it seemed like a cute way to hold pencils.  But my kids are much older now and it needed a change.  I would like to use this on my desk - but could never look at it all day in it's current form.  So, I grabbed a can of chalkboard paint (which I had from this project) and spray painted it.

Already looking better!  But I still wanted to dress it up a bit.  So, I added jute around the ridge towards the top - I just hot-glued it on -

I had that leftover from a dresser redo I recently completed (which is still one of my favorite projects ever - check it out here).  Then I added another band of jute around the bottom -

And here's the finished project -

Now that's a pencil holder I can use on my desk!  And the whole thing was free!!  Don't you love cheap and easy projects?