If there is ever an opportunity for my kids and I to make something together, we try to do the craft together. Last year we attempted to make three dimensional snow flakes that didn’t turn out so well. We tried, but no matter what we did to connect the snowflakes in the middle, all you could see was the pipe cleaner from every stem of the snowflake. This year we opted for something a little simpler, and it actually turned out better than I thought it would. These were constructed using the same materials as last year, we recycled them.

Our project consisted of white pipe cleaners and clear beads that would fit on the pipe cleaner. This year I had a clear idea about how we could keep the snowflakes together. A hot glue gun. I’m not sure why this thought never crossed my mind last year, but I’m sure that every crafter out there has a hot glue gun hidden somewhere. I actually found mine at Dollar Tree, and it still works after several years.

First we hot glued three strips of beaded pipe cleaner together at different angles, which made for a very pretty and simple snowflake.

We could have actually stopped right there, but then as I was laying two of the snowflakes together, I thought that it looked even better, and decided to hot glue to snowflakes together as well. The end result is the picture at the very top, and then these can be hung by fishing line (I’ll have to buy some of this), or by some other means, like a pretty ribbon. I think that the large snowflake could actually take one more layer of snowflake hot glued together, but we were willing to stop with what we had and experiment in other ways with out leftover beads and pipe cleaner. The kids enjoyed this project immensely for about the first five minutes, and then of course it became like a job threading the beads onto the pipe cleaner. Don’t forget to unplug the hot glue gun. I did.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 8:15 am and is filed under Simple Living. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.