DIY Bead and Tassel Necklace for Children
Orla, our 3 year old is growing up a little too fast for my liking! Lately, she has been obsessed with necklaces and jewellery and make up! She loves to sit and try on all my necklaces and choose her favourites and her fascination with make up has resulted in two tricky make up and nail varnish on the carpet incidents! If anyone knows a trick to get foundation out of carpets – please let me know!! So, I promised Orla I’d make her a DIY children’s bead and tassel necklace of her very own. She had one requirement – it had to include pink!
I decided to make the children’s necklaces as I had lots of embroidery thread to use up. Elodie had some kid’s FIMO for Christmas which we still hadn’t tried out so we decided to have a go making beads from it. This took a fair few goes to get it right! We found it better to make the beads small as twisting larger pieces of FIMO often cracked when drying.
If you’d like to make your own kid’s bead and tassel necklace, here’s what you will need:
- FIMO
- Pony Beads
- Embroidery Thread
- Knitting needle or skewer
- Small Jump Rings
- Jewellery pliers (optional)
- Make some small beads out of FIMO. Try twisting them or rolling them. The easiest way we found is to make 3 small very thin sausages with different colours and then twist together. Before you bake them, use a skewer or knitting needle to add the hole in the bead. Bake according to instructions.
2. To make the tassels, cut the embroidery thread to the length required, use more threads for a bunchy tassel. Fold it in half and tie a piece of thread around the middle. Tie another piece of thread about a third of the way down and cut off any straggly ends.
3. Add a Jump Hoop (for jewellery making) at the top and leave the end of the jump hoop slightly open.
4. Take a long piece of embroidery thread and measure it on your child, for the length of the necklace. You can use stretchy jewellery elastic to make this easier for children to put on and off.
5. Make your necklace design by threading on your own beads and pony beads. Tie a knot at the end to make the necklace complete. Orla loved designing her own necklace and threading beads was great practise for her fine motor skills, although our handmade small FIMO beads were too tricky for her!
6. Lastly, add your tassels to the middle of the necklace by closing the jump hoops around the necklace thread. Adding and closing jump hoops is easier with jewellery pliers but you can use scissors or any pair of small pliers too!
Hopefully your little ones will love their necklace as much as my cheeky little monkey! Trying to get her to pose for a photo was tricky!
I thought these would make great ideas for party bags or for kits for a party activity for girls to make their own!
