Quick DIY Minecraft Binder

Here’s a fun little school supply customization that you can do for your resident Minecraft fan (and if you’ve got kids in school, you’ve probably got at least ONE minecraft fan). Quick DIY Minecraft Binders!

This project uses Sharpies. When I was down at Walmart Headquarters last spring along with the folks from Duck Tape (who sent me some cool supplies and inspired my Duck Tape Leatherman Pouch and Duck Tape Lunchbox) we met the folks from Sharpies and got to play with some of the great Sharpie products!

They were kind enough to send a nice box full of their products both the “traditional” markers:

and some really cool back to school type products, like Sharpie Highlighters and scented markers!

For this DIY project all I really needed though was a black, chisel tipped Sharpie. I also needed a couple of 1″ binders from Walmart in green and red, and something to follow as a pattern.

Minecraft is a helpfully pixelated gaming world. Helpful because pixels are squares, and everything in Minecraft is made from squares (or blocks). That means it’s pretty easy to figure out how to draw anything for Minecraft because it’s based on a grid!

For my starting pattern I just searched for “Minecraft Perler Pattern”. Perler is a brand of those plastic melting beads where folks put the little beads on the peg board and then use wax paper and an iron to melt them together. Since the peg boards are a grid pattern, and Minecraft is in grid patterns I knew that I’d be able to find an accurate representation that I could copy. I easily found a melting bead pattern for a TNT block and a Creeper block.

The blocks are 10X10 in the patterns. I chose to make my box on the front of the binders 8″ by 8″ in order to fit nicely.

For the creeper I decided to treat the grid as if it were 5X5 and marked across the top, bottom, and sides of the grid in 1 and 5/8 inch increments (I know, that sounds painful, but basically you just mark every 13 eights, ie 18 of the longer sub-division lines on your ruler). Then I was able to very carefully measure down and across and draw in the simple creeper eyes and mouth.

For the TNT I did it a bit differently. I again used an 8″ by 8″ box, then I divided it horizontally into thirds. The top and bottom sections are divided into 4 red bands by 5 wide-ish black lines. So I went ahead and and divided the top and bottom into four 2″ sections, then used the chisel tip part of the marker to widen the lines up. The hardest part was the TNT–I free handed them on spacing (but used a ruler to keep them straight). I spaced the verticles on my letter “n” too far apart and had to put an extra cube in there, but it still looks good.

What do you think, would the Minecraft lover in your life enjoy these binders?