Back to School: DIY School Supplies Upgrade

love back to school season! I may be going into my (hopefully) final year of college and I still love shopping for school supplies! Now, there’s a lot of supplies in stores that have really chic, adorable prints but they’re expensive-I have spent $5 per folder when they’ll wear out in 6 months! So, I decided to go to Staples, grab some of the super cheap school supplies deals, and do some of my own DIY school supplies upgrades! These were super quick and easy, all you need is some cute washi tape and gold paint!

Back to School: DIY School Supplies Upgrade

Let’s start with the paper folder redux. I love these, I got mine for a quarter each at Meijer, but they can be pretty bland-which also makes a great canvas for some creativity! My personal aesthetic as a designer is to make a statement with minimalism so I immediately grabbed some gold washi tape (I found this at the dollar spot at Target for $1!) and went ahead with lining just the edges-this is super quick and you can do it all in one strip! And the best part is, these are the places where my folders start to show some wear & tear first but now they have cute tape to protect them!

Now for those tabbed dividers-I saw a pack of 3 in a chic print for $5-imagine if you needed 15 dividers, that’s $25 right there! So once again, grab that handy-fancy washi tape and start striping some designs. You can go a little more conservative on your tape supply as I did and do a striped/geometric design, or you can cover the whole side if you have enough tape!

And lastly, gold-dipped pencils. I love my Ticonderogas, but they’re not exactly fancy. So I grabbed a $1 bottle of metallic gold paint, dipped the tips of the pencils in, and then let them dry at an angle so the paint wouldn’t get messed up too much.

So that’s it! I hope you picked up some tips on how to spice up your school supplies on a budget!

Thanks for reading,