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Until about a month ago, when I read this post at a Storybook Life, I had no idea that you could make something this pretty out of old newspapers.  

So we had to try our own.

We cut newspapers into small pieces (even Alexandra had fun doing that).

Pour boiling water over them to cover them and let sit one hour.

Squeeze out as much water as possible and then add clear drying glue till it sticks together in a ball.

Roll into whatever size ball you want and place on a cookie sheet to dry for several days.

Roll the beads around a few times while drying so they don’t get flat on any one side.

Once they’re dry drill a hole through the center of each bead.

(For smoother beads you can sand them gently with sand paper, but we didn’t do that for the beads you see pictured.)

Paint with acrylic paints.  Let dry.

Put on a coat or two of lacquer to make them shiny and scratch proof. 

The kids made about 40 before they were tired of rolling them into beads.  The hardest part for them was waiting the several days till the beads dried so we could drill holes in them and paint them.   

We want to make more of these soon to try some different ideas.You can make them bigger or smaller and we want to try different shapes.

For now we strung some together for a necklace, and painted some white for a little snowman ornament.  

I see lots of interesting paper bead Christmas ornaments in our future this year.

Tags: Add new tag, Crafty, recycle

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 at 9:11 am and is filed under Crafty, recycle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.