Craft Project

Yvonne came up with a great idea to do for a craft project with the children while we are there, breaded cross necklaces, they are great because they are easy, functional, and religious too.

We headed off to JoAnn Fabrics to pick up the items after we exhausted ourselves with dehydrated goods at Wal-Mart :) My mom manages the Smokey Pointe location so we stopped in said hi and hit the pony bead aisle. Lots of an assortment, we decided on the mixed color variety pony bead boxes, now we need the string. Typically you would use leather, which we found out is $1.49 a yard, and we needed 400 yards! Wow that wasn't going to work, so mom came up with an alternative.. hemp twine. The price was much much better.

I decided to take on the project set up, I love feeling involved and helping! Set up included making a sample cross, than separating out all the beads needed for each necklace in to 400 bags. (We wanted to make sure there was enough for each kid). I was so excited when I got home that I starting working on my sample, this should be an easy kids project right? Wrong! hahah since we changed the twine it changed alot of the functionality and design, I had to overcompensate for the much thinner floppier twine and try and make them as small (to use less beads) as possible. 7 trial crosses later.... I will admit most looked like plus signs! Here was my top three.

Number 1 looks a little floppy and too even, Number 3 was nice and sturdy, but really difficult to do, I had to tie little knots in the middle to reinforce the cross from flopping all around, than I came up with the idea of the bead in the middle. Number 2 ended up being my pick, more resembled a cross and used less beads.

I had to have someone "test" out my cross, who else better than Dennis, my big kid! I had made up directions on the computer, gave him the right amount of beads and twine and let him play away, his cross turned out pretty good.

Okay now to package all of the 400 different packages! Grabbing all my goodies, I headed over to my sister Shannon's and wrangled her in to helping me. After hours we only got 150 packaged up! ahhh

Luckily I got my little helpers to package them all up tonight.. Thanks Jason, Dennis and Shannon (I'm sure I can get more too!)