A Crafty Afternoon With My Girl: Clay Bead Necklaces

Little M and I love doing crafty stuff together. At two, she is too little to do any sewing yet, but we love to draw, paint, glue pompoms, sequins, fabric, anything really onto paper, make beads, dress-ups - you name it, we love doing it together.

At the moment young Little M has a raggedy cough so we've been spending the last few days inside (she's on the mend btw). I had run out of ideas to keep my rambunctious girl entertained, so I googled craft necklaces, and came across Blogless Anna's Oven-dried Clay Beaded Necklace tutorial. I thought it looked great and something a two-year-old would enjoy with a little help from her mum.

So off to Spotlight we went this morning and bought five little packets of oven-baking clay. It wasn't cheap - nearly $6 a packet, but I figured it would be really fun and I would get a cool new necklace too!

I'm not going to reiterate the tutorial - hop on over to Anna's blog using the above link if you want to make some of these beauties.

Here they are just after they came out of the oven:

As you can see, Little M also made a bangle. I had to help a bit more with that one.

Here they are all finished:

Little M immediately opted for pink and purple - I find it funny when she gravitates to these colours. I don't dress her in gender-specific colours on purpose, so I find it both fascinating and amusing when she wants the more 'girly' colours. Don't get me wrong - I love pink and purple myself, I just don't want her to be exclusively dressed in those colours.

She did an amazingly neat job at rolling the clay into beads. It wasn't particularly pliable either - maybe because it is cold here in Melbourne? All I did was poke the hole through with the skewer. Pretty talented young girl I have.

Anyway, mine are the green and yellow - and I LOVE them. I mixed white into the yellow and green to get some different shades. We put them onto natural leather strands and Michael tied some adjustable knots for us.

I'll show you a picture of me wearing them in the next few days, but here is Little M wearing hers with the other beaded necklace she made today:

Isn't she lovely?! And a little bit grubby.