DIY: ‘What We Will Do After Lockdown’ Activity Jar

What You Will Need | An Empty Jar | Scissors | Paper | Permanent or Paint Pens (or acrylic paint) | A normal pen | Elastic Band or String

To start with you need to clean your jar of any labels or stickers that are on it to create a blank canvas for your design. To do this, first try and peel the labels off, you may be lucky and they might just glide off. If this doesn’t work and they get all stuck, you can also wash them off. To do this, peel your unwanted stickers off as much as you can. Then fill a washing up bowl with hot soapy water and leave the jar to soak for five minutes. When the time is up you should be able to just rub the stickiness off. A blank canvas, just dry it off and you’re ready for the next step.

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Now you have your nice clean jar, it is time for the fun part – decorating! To decorate my jar I used a black Posca paint pen (although any permanent pen or paint will work just fine) to write ‘post lockdown activity jar’ in swirly writing and then drew some little stars around the text.

I kept my jar design simple, but you could go wild with your decoration and don’t forget you can decorate the lid too – why not grab some pompoms or material!

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Now make some slips of paper and attach them to your jar so whenever you have an idea of something that you would love to do when lockdown and this big mess is over, you can write it down straight away. By making the jar easy to use you will be sure to keep using it, so don’t miss out this step!

Cut yourself lots of small slips of paper, in any colour and size you’d like. They just need to be big enough to write on and small enough to get into your jar with ease.

Finally all that is left to do is to pop your elastic band around the neck of your jar and tuck your strips of paper between it and the jar for safe keeping. You could also pop a small pen onto the band too, to make life even easier!

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And there you have it! Wasn’t that easy! We’ve had ours on the side in our kitchen for about a week now and it is already filling up with lots of fun things to do in the future. From getting a specific cake from our favourite cafe to grand trips out and visiting friends and family, no idea is too big or too small.

Top tip: if you are sharing your jar with the people you are isolating with maybe write the initial of the person whose idea you are writing down in the corner of the paper if it is specific to them!

Have you got many things you want to do when this is all over? I think that’s a silly question, but for now stay safe and look forward to all the fun in the future.