Tips & Tricks: DIY paint brush rest

Too clever by half!

I paint a lot of different colors at the same time. After getting really annoyed with having to lay wet brushes down all over my workspace (on my laptop keyboard, on rolls of tape, across the dirty brush cup ... ), I decided there must be an easier way!

I bought a pack of white Sculpey (because white is obviously what you want to put wet paint brushes on) and promptly left it on my desk for 3 months.

Eventually I got fed up with clumsily painting myself with a different color every time I reached for something, and knocking brushes off their precarious perches onto my (again, white - what is my deal) desk and made my stinking paintbrush rests already!

Sculpey comes conveniently pre-notched in quarters, so I took each piece and rolled it out into a tube. Then I used a wooden clay shaper thing that I had lying around to create the divots where the brush goes. You can see by the longest one that I didn't make the spaces big enough the first time I pressed into the clay. Whoops.

Then bake in the oven on wax paper, wash the nasty clay residue off your hands 3 times, and voila! Clay paintbrush rests!

This has cut down the amount of times I've put a paintbrush on my laptop by at least 73%. Hey, old habits die hard.

If anyone has any little tips or tricks that help make their crafting process more efficient, I'd love to hear them! Please write in a comment below!

-- Jocelyn // paragraphloop.etsy.com