Today is International Earth Day 2015 and to mark the occasion we have been sent the Eco Bead Craft Kit from Interplay to create our own jewellery made from recycled scraps of paper.
The Eco Bead kit from interplay is aimed at children aged 8 years and above and includes the tools and accessories needed to make beautiful beaded jewellery. You just add the paper!
I love up-cycling and reusing things so the idea of recycling paper to create some funky jewellery really appealed to me, Ben loves anything crafty and decided he wanted to make a bracelet for his little sister.
The My Style Craft kit includes 3 different types of template to cut out the correct shapes of your paper ready to make them into beads. We decided to use some old newspaper that was waiting to be recycled, some wrapping paper and some scraps of coloured paper from our craft box. One great thing about the shape of the templates is that they are long and thin so you can genuinely use scraps of discarded paper or even ripped newspaper.
Once we had cut the paper it was time to use the curling tool, despite this being quite small it was simple to use and really effective, both Ben and I easily got the hang of it and I actually found it quite cathartic! As you roll the paper around you gently dab the PVA glue on to it and then glaze with some more glue afterwards. To allow the beads to dry the kit includes a foam mat and cocktail sticks to stand them on. (We did find that you got rather sticky and the glue got everywhere so I would suggest covering the table with newspaper first.)
Once the beads are dry (we left ours overnight) you can get creative with the provided accessories to turn your recycled paper beads in to beautiful bracelets, earrings and more! One thing to note is we found the thicker string quite difficult to thread through the small decorative seed beads but it was fine with the paper beads that we made.
We created a pair of newspaper print bead earrings and a bracelet made from recycled wrapping paper.
I think the newspaper print earrings look great and will wear them proudly! I also love the idea of trying this with old books that have been damaged, I think they would look really effective and go fantastically with the Romeo and Juliet real page fragment pendant my husband bought me for our anniversary.
Another fabulous idea for this kit is to up-cycle old pieces of your children's artwork, I love how Anna from In the Play Room created beads with her children's bubble paintings.
If you really haven't got any paper to recycle you can print off colouful templates from the Interplay website ready to create beads with.
Ben and I really enjoyed using this kit together and he is really proud of what we created.
The Eco Bead craft kit is available from Amazon
and John Lewis and has an RRP of £7.99 which I believe is really great value as you get plenty of accessories included and when these are used up you still have the tool that you could make plenty more beads with and use ribbon or wool to display them. I can see this getting a bit addictive!
To celebrate Earth Day we have an Eco Beads Craft Kit from Interplay to give away to one of My Mummy's Pennies' readers. Simple complete the Rafflecopter form below for your chance to win...
Good Luck!
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