It was just the Spring Equinox! So we made fairies. We always make flower fairies, or something for them, like houses. This year we shared it with our art group. The moms had a great time making these flower fairies. The kids (5-6yrs) unfortunately just wanted to pick out the bits and have their moms put them together. Maybe I could have staged things better, I’m sure we will try again next spring, and I will try to lay things out so that the method is easier for little fingers.

What you need:

• Silk scraps cut into flower shapes
• Glass and/or wooden beads for bodies and heads.
• Hemp beading coord
• Fine gauge wire for homemade beading needle, or other needle
• Pliers

You especially need the pliers if your doubled over cord is a tight fit for the glass beads. This is project is better for small hands if you use plastic pony beads, but I don’t like to buy plastic.

The flower cut outs were made by my new sizzix die-cutter-thingy. I used Tim Holtz’s Tattered Florals die. You can cut perfectly beautiful flowers by hand, but not enough for 9 kids and 5 moms without going crazy. So I finally broke down and got a die cutter, I have been wanting one for forever. Actually, I was NOT buying one yet again, and my husband took the computer and bought it for me. Awesome. Now I just have to figure out where to put it!

I am going to start out by sharing how to make your own beading needles for super cheap. Never be without the pesky useful things again! That is, as long as you have a spool of fine gauge wire. This is something higher than 30, I tried to measure it with our wire strippers, but that is as high as they go. Not much higher than 30, but a bit. 32-34 possibly. I don’t even know if you can buy wire like this anymore, I’m pretty sure it is older than I am and belonged to my grandmother. It’s been kicking around with my beading supplies for, probably about 25 years now, and has finally found its calling. Isn’t that a beautiful label though? I’m guessing it’s from post WWII Japan, 50′s or 60′s, and probably full of lead, but I’ll just keep it out of everyone’s mouth and pretend I didn’t think about that! Back on topic.

So, cut some fine gage wire twice the length you want your needle. Not plastic coated, not 49 strand super beading wire, just plain old bare drawn wire. Soft, not springy.

Grab the two ends together in the pliers, stick your finger through the loop and start twiddling your finger around like you’re absentmindedly twisting up your hair into dreads and driving your mother batty.

As it gets twisted up it should break right off. If it gets too tight before it breaks, try putting a pencil in (don’t garrote your finger!), or bending it back and forth without twisting. You want it to work harden and break off right where the pliers are holding it.

These are super useful (although softer than real beading needles which have been spring tempered), and what is semi critical for this project, expendable!

On to the fairies, nothing deep and mysterious here, I’m sure you can figure it out yourself, but here’s how we did it!

Start by laying out your bits. Flower cut outs for the skirt, a bead for the body, a bead for the head, and a small flower for the hat.

Cut a doubled layer of hemp cord and thread it onto your needle.

String up everything you laid out from bottom to top, without pushing it right off the end of your cord. If your fabric is too tightly woven for your homemade needle you may have to snip a tiny hole in the center. I found if I just carefully poked a couple times I could generally make it through. When everything is strung, tie a knot into the loop at the top. At this point you have two choices, you can cut the loop into antennas, freeing your needle, or you can untwist or cut your expendable needle. You may be able to twist it back up into another needle, but its life is certainly limited.

Push all the fairy bits up against the knot at the top, and tie a square knot under the bottom flower skirt to make hips and hold the whole thing together.

Tie overhand knots for feet, leaving enough string so the legs are just longer than the longest skirt. Cut the cord off below the feet.

Take a short length of cord and tie an overhand knot in-between the head bead and body bead. Then tie two more overhand knots for the hands and trim off the extra cord.

Then it is tea party time!

I have NO action shots of this project, how does that happen? Kindergarden has eaten my brain obviously. The girls had a fabulous time with this though, it took lots of concentration to weave the wire through the pairs of beads in each direction, but at least three of them finished rings, and they were so proud of them that they wore them all week. They were REAL rings! So exciting to see them excited!

Here is our materials pile, glass pony beads, wire cutters & pliers, & thin green florist’s wire that my husband got for cheep from American Science and Surplus. Along with the plaster cloth. I <3 those guys.

We roughly followed the directions from That Artist Woman’s Bead Rings post.

The glass pony beads made the rings a little thick, but they are large enough that they made the project go just fast enough to be satisfyingly challenging for a 5 year old. In another two years maybe we will revisit this project with seed beads. Because, you know, we have been meeting for three years now! June 4th, 2008, Wow! To think I had no clue what I was doing, but that is what being a mom is all about, no clue, but here’s what we need to do!

And then, whoa! Somehow with my ‘unique’ novice beading skills I end up with something that looks more like a Bollywood headdress. But! Rebecca, recently having watched the Never Ending Story looked at it and said, “Oh, it’s like that thing the princess wears in the Never Ending Story!” So, I guess? Win?

I started with a ring of 5 shockingly tiny beads, I’ve only recently become aware that seed beads even came in different sizes… These are from Japan and sized ‘super small’. Okay, they aren’t labeled and I can’t remember. ‘Super small’ was truthfully not part of the actual product description.

It just sort of grew and grew. The part where I wove a pentagonally symmetric net around a square stone was interesting! Luckily no one told me it was a dumb idea before I started, and it worked! Mostly.

Taking a more distant look at it, now that it is no longer right in my face, it’s really no where near the 10 on the overdone Bollywood scale that I thought it was. More like a 2, maybe a 1! Whew!

And here is my baby sister who’s head I crammed it onto just before she got into the Rolls-Royce to begin her honey moon! Lucky girl is in the Caribbean now!

Start with a box. Actually we finished with the box, or maybe it came in the middle somewhere. Really, my husband saved me with the box. I was sitting in the middle of the kitchen, in the middle of a whirlwind of scraps trying desperately to decoupage a shoe box into a nice sewing box. I had a vision, but it was sticky slow going, it wasn’t going well, and I was quickly running out of time. He pointed out a nice box I could re-gift instead, hurray! (Thanks Ma, your gift turned out to be super useful, and exactly what I needed, just not in the way you intended!)

Add some loose woven canvas squares (ours is thrifted, I think it is wool, it is super soft, but serves the same purpose as sewing on burlap, but much nicer.) and squares of cross stitch fabric you have lying around, and an embroidery hoop.

Gussy up an Altoids box with some fancy paper (I love double sided tape) and fill it with buttons. Buttons are great fodder for beginning sewers.

Turn a cardstock jewelry box into a great little embroidery floss box by wrapping it with scrapbooking cardstock to make it taller. (More double sided tape!) The lid still fits on fine, and it is just the right size now, hurray! I think this making boxes taller trick would come in useful lots of places.

Toss in other random bits and bobs because you always go overboard that way. A box of pink beads, because sewing beads on is fun (as long as you make sure the holes of the beads are sufficiently larger than your needle size, seed beads are not fun for 5 year olds to sew with, glass pony beads are great.) A spool of vintage cotton, um, string? Oh, some old fat knitting needles and a plastic baggie of scrap yarn balls. Yes, we are going too far, oh well, it isn’t like we need to keep any of this stuff.

Finish it off with something actually nice, (inspired by Pink and Green Mama’s Felt Needle Book), except for how you are desperately trying to finish it while your daughter’s carpool to the party is waiting, and the ribbon loop/button that holds it shut isn’t quite what it should be. And then PANIC that all of your needles you thought you had have mysteriously disappeared and start tossing things up into the air. Please skip that last part.

Rebecca also made her a bracelet, her first pattern bracelet, she counted 7 small pink beads, then two larger pink beads and repeated perfectly about six times. First time she’s made jewelry that wasn’t a random collection! And I didn’t even get a picture I was in such a rush, shoot!

I hope Anna likes her present, I know I would have loved it!

One month ago Rebecca started her second year of preschool (parent co-op which she loves and never wants to leave, today she said she wished the school day was longer… Next year baby…). Penelope went down for her nap, and I suddenly had an hour and a half of completely child free time. How novel! (Rebecca hasn’t napped in two years…) So I used it to assuage my guilt at not having made Rebecca a back to school anything, and made her a pink necklace. She’s just started to get into pink. And princesses… If you asked her what her favorite color was before the school year started, she would say, all the colors that my art friends and I use to paint with. Now she says pink. And black, sometimes. Anyway, I gave her the necklace as a ‘congratulations on your first day of a new school’ present, which she was thrilled with. The school and the necklace.

To make it I used the clear stretchy beading string you can get at the craft store. We use a lot of it around here, Rebecca loves to make bracelets, and so do some of her friends. We use the 1mm stuff, which is pretty sturdy. For the kids I used to try to knot it, or knot it around a bead for a stop, which sometimes came off, it’s slippery stuff. (When you make the final knot you have to use a dot of super glue to lock it.) I’ve finally figured out that the best way to start a string of this stuff for a small child is to bend the end into a large U and fold some masking tape around it.

I also dug into my vintage cats eye and crackle beads, glass pony beads and seed beads, and the few remaining pink beads in our glass bead grab bag. Need to get some more of those!

Yes, I realize that the winter holidays are so last month! And frankly, we did this last month, but there you go, right now my house is full of moving boxes and not so full of exciting crafts! Two weeks to go.

The pine cones were a Friday Art Group project, we painted them white and then sprinkled them with kosher salt – it comes in larger flakes than table salt, but not so large as rock salt, and makes reasonable glitter substitute. We have no glitter in our house. Okay, we have one bottle of clear plastic glitter somewhere, but I don’t know where, and if I did I might not say.

The mini tree is a dead bonsai tree my husband gave me… We stuck it in some flour play dough and baked it. Somehow the tree wicked up the salt (maybe it was salt dough, honestly I don’t remember, it keeps a disgracefully long time.) and turned whiter than it was to start with, kinda cool. We hung lots of little mini ornaments on it with tweezers and fingers. It was a great fine motor activity, and lots of fun. The mini ornaments consist mostly of plastic beads and sequins in various arrangements strung on earring wires from the craft store. I have them from years ago, but next year I should find more earring wires (just short wires with a flat bump at the end – you could just twist a loop instead) and let Rebecca make the ornaments. I don’t think that tree is going to make it to next year, maybe we will have to use one of the still-living bonsai, it would be much sturdier too, even if it wouldn’t give as much of the ‘winter’ aspect.

First we got a pound of random glass beads, I’m sure they are all rejects from some bead factory, but who cares if they have holes we aren’t going to be stringing them anyway. Rebecca and I started the day sorting them by color. I thought we would do a couple and get bored, but we made it through almost all of them, sorting glass beads is a lot of fun! Um, maybe I’m compulsive or something.

We didn’t try to make bowls, we spent the whole time mashing beads into the clay and pulling them out, smooshing beady clay up, picking it apart… It was great. They stuck with it much longer than most of the things we’ve done recently, usually somebody breaks for the tricycles and then it’s all over. So two thumbs up. Smooshy tactile salt-flour clay and pretty glass beads make a good combo.

And then we had naked running through the sprinklers in the back yard – but no pictures of that!