Garden Recycled Crafts

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We are lucky to have a few gorgeous trees in our garden with an abundance of bird life (even though our cat is desperately trying to remedy the situation!) A lot of reading and conversations take place under our trees. I’ve decided to brighten up our favourite reading spot with some Valentine’s inspired recycle crafts. Lots of hearts and red!

Develop fine motor skills with these crafts too! Beading is a great activity for little hands. It is excellent for fine motor skills, counting and pattern recognition. Surprisingly even my thirteen year old “I’m too cool for this stuff” son helped to string beads.

For the Tube Suncatcher you will need:

Large tube (you can get this from your local sign writer, they normally throw it away.)
Jewellery Wire (available from most China Malls, you can use normal fishing gut but the wire is much stronger and relatively inexpensive.
Acrylic Paint
Marker Pen
Beads
Varnish

Drill small holes in a straight line on the one side of the tube (where you want to hang your beads from). Drill another two holes at the top corners. Paint the tube background with acrylic paint and once the paint is dry, add some designs of your choice. You can paint your designs or draw it with a marker pen. Once dry, paint the tube with a few coats of varnish. The more layers of varnish you paint, the longer your tube will last outside. You can close the ends of your tube to keep the insects and water out.

Making the pots:

I used a normal drip tray from our plastic pots. Cut a length of wire, tie a bead to one side and thread through the hole from the inside so the bead is on the top but inside the tube. Do the same with remainder of the holes. Decide on a pattern and thread all the beads.

I used a coffee tin and an old bucket for our flower pots. If you are going to paint metal, enamel is always a good choice. You only need to sand the surface lightly before painting, no primer needed. I used clear Bostik to glue the embellishments, added a beaded handle to the coffee tin. Remember to punch a few holes in the bottom of the tin for drainage. Let the kids decide on flowers and where to hang the decorations!