Day 10 of our 12 Crafts of Christmas activity and today’s craft is a simple one you can set the kids. Perhaps you’re a teacher looking for an easy Christmas craft activity to keep your class busy as you wind down for Christmas, or maybe you’re at home with the kids and want something fun to keep little hands busy. Children will enjoy choosing their coloured beads and personalising their tree decorations and the finished product looks fab too!
You will need:
- 4 x pipe cleaner stems
- length of ribbon
- Pack of coloured barrel beads
Instructions:
- First you need to make a snowflake shape to form the frame of your decoration. To do this, take your pipe cleaner stems and cut them in half so you have four stems of the same size.
- Now take two of the stems and twist them around each other a few times in the middle to form a cross shape.
- Now take a third stem and wrap this around the middle so that it forms two ‘arms’ of similar sizes to the others.
- Finally, use your last stem and repeat the above step. Ensure the stems are secured together in the middle and the arms of the snowflake are roughly the same size. Cut off any excess if the sizes look different.
- Select the bead colours you want to use on your snowflake and (one arm at a time), begin threading the barrel beads onto the arms. Allow a little surplus pipe cleaner at the end of the arm, as you will need to loop this over to prevent the beads from falling off.
- Repeat this process with each of the snowflake arms, until each arm is covered in beads. We managed to fit seven beads on each arm of our snowflake.
- Ensure each of the snowflake arms are ‘tied off’ by creating a small loop at the end of each to stop the beads from falling off when the decoration is hung.
- To complete your decoration, cut a small length of ribbon or twine and tie it to one of the snowflake arms – creating a loop to hang your handy work.
- Now all that remains is to hang your decoration to your Christmas tree.
Variation:
Why not add a jingle bell to the end of each of the snowflake’s arms so it sounds as pretty as it looks.
Don’t forget to check out tomorrow’s Bright craft idea.
