171) Rolled Paper Beads

If you are a mom we know in real life you might want to hold off on reading this post until after Sunday or just act surprised when we give you one of these necklaces for Mother's Day. The last few weeks we have been spending some rainy afternoons making these fun and easy to make paper beads. Each bead only takes a few moments to make so over the course of a few afternoons, even with the relative short attention span of a 3 and 5 year old, we have been able to make enough beads for a few necklaces. We are now starting to work on turning these beads into necklaces as presents for all the mothers we love for mother day.

The idea for the beads came from Martha Stewart's Crafts For Kids book, which Is filled with tons and tons of awesome kid projects! We have only tried a few from this book but there are so many projects in there that I can't wait to try. To make the beads we used:

Colorful paper cut into 1"triangles

Glue stick

Drinking straws

I started by cutting some colorful paper into 1" wide long triangles. We used a Kid Made Modern paper from Target but you could also use an origami paper, or even old kid drawings/paintings work for this project. I used a paper cutter to cut the triangles making sure the wide end of the triangle was 1" wide but you could also cut the paper with scissors. 

Once the papers were all cut I showed the girls how to rolls the beads. Placing the pattern side down, we started with the wide side of the triangle closest to them. They then placed a plastic drinking straw on the paper and slowly rolled the straw and paper away from them. When the paper was mostly wrapped around the straw they used the glue stick to put a little glue on the end of the triangle before rolling the rest of the triangle up. Once the paper was entirely wrapped around we pulled the paper bead off the straw and put all the finished beads into a bowl. The Bee had no trouble making the beads. After I showed her how to make the first one she was off making a bunch. The Bean took a few tries before getting the hang of it, but once she did I was impressed with how well she did. We now have a bowl full of paper beads and have started stringing them onto pieces of elastic to make some necklaces. I am hoping to get a few more done tomorrow so we can give them to all our favorite moms on Sunday.

We also made a few beads using triangles cut from the girls drawings. I loved the way these turned out and using their drawings made them seem so much more fun and personal. Not to mention a great way to use the ever growing stack of artwork we always seem to accumulate. I think the kid art beads would be perfect for Mother's Day.