tissue paper projects Archives

This is a little project Miss G and I have been working on ever since we went shopping for an event I was attending and Grae fell in love with some brightly-coloured bangles. Though it was a bit of a process, these wooden popsicle stick bracelets are really easy, fun, and inexpensive to make and my little accessory lover is very pleased with the results.

To start off, we soaked some wooden popsicle sticks in a covered mason jar of water for a full 24 hours.

Then, I gently bent them into ‘C’ shapes in order to fit them in tea light holders. One thing I noticed during this step is that there seemed to be a way that the sticks naturally wanted to be bent… Working with that made the job a lot easier. The one I tried to bend against the natural direction actually ended up snapping.

We could have left our popsicle sticks in the tea light holders to dry as is, but since they weren’t perfectly fitted to the edges of the containers, we filled them up with water and let them sit another 24 hours before draining them and letting them dry out.

After drying a full day, the bracelets held their shapes nicely.

When we popped them out of the tea light holders, they looked like this. Certainly not perfect, but a cuff shape nonetheless.

At this point, the bracelets looked really tiny, but they fit G (who will be 3 in just a couple of months) perfectly. The good thing is that you can always make the opening a little larger with a gentle bend.

These could be decorated a multitude of ways, but we opted for a tissue paper colour transfer for watercolour sort of look. In order to do that, we got out a few things… Water in a small spray bottle, some tissue squares, a toilet paper roll (which was quickly replaced with a chunk of a branch similar in size), and the bracelets themselves of course.

We started off by putting the bracelets around the paper roll just to make them easier to work on.

Then Miss G gave them a light misting of water to make them ‘sticky’…

And covered the entire stick in tissue paper squares, adding a spritz or two of water along the way if needed.

Then, when she was happy with her coverage, she sprayed the whole thing down once again, allowing the tissue paper to cling tightly to the wooden bangle.

My part of the job was carefully removing the bracelets covered in tissue from the paper roll / branch. Once removed, I carefully wrapped the excess tissue around the backside of the bracelet. One thing I did not anticipate is that the small amount of water sprayed onto the bracelets actually starting causing them to lose their shape.