While we’ve painted with frozen watercolour ice cubes many times, today we decided to try something a little bit different… Instead of freezing our usual concoction of water and food colouring, we simply froze children’s paint. And just for fun, we decided we’d create frozen paint wands instead of the usual cubes!
In addition to our annual Valentine’s Day tea, Gracen and I have a couple of other Valentine’s parties and classes to attend this year. And since we don’t do the whole candy thing just yet, it means getting a little bit more creative with the ‘treats’ she hands out. When I asked her what she’d like to give her friends, she responded with Valentine’s slime (thanks I’m sure to our Halloween version for her ballet class friends) and heart wands (thanks to a Kiwi Crate package we received from our most recent PBK story time). And because both take a little bit of prep work, we started early… More time left over to figure out what we’ll bring for the 30+ kiddos in her Strong Start class, right?
These little wands are beautiful and easy to make, and although some may think they’re a little ‘girly’, we believe that hearts and magic are for everyone. ☺
Here are the materials we used for the project… Wooden dowels, adhesive glitter foam sheets, acrylic paint, a paint brush, and some ribbon. The best part is that we picked up all of these things at our local dollar store, so not only were they inexpensive, but we only had to make one stop – always nice with a toddler in tow.
First off, we started the project by painting our wooden dowels. Miss G does not always enjoy having her hands covered in paint, so we attached clothespins to the ends of the dowels so she could rotate them as she painted without painting her fingers. When she declared a dowel done, I went over the stick with a couple of quick strokes in order to smooth out the globs.
Then, because the tips were not painted where the clothespins were, I was able to stick the dowels into chunks of {gingerbread} play dough to dry upright.
A couple of days later, when our paint was good and dry (it actually only takes about an hour), we came back to our project. We started by drawing a heart shape onto a piece of cardboard and cutting it out to use as a tracer.
Next, using our newly-made tracer, we traced hearts onto the backs of our foam sheets. Gracen was happy to do the first few, and let me do the others when it came to this job.
With some strategic placement, we were able to fit 4 hearts onto each of our foam sheets, but of course it depends on the size of your tracer and the size of your foam sheets.
Next, we cut out the hearts.
Now to actually assemble a wand, you need two foam hearts, a wooden dowel, and a cute little helper.
This right here was Grae’s favourite part of the whole project… Peeling the backings off of the hearts!
With one heart shaped peeled, we placed the sticky side up on our work surface and placed the unfinished end of our dowel in the centre of the heart, up maybe an inch or inch and a half from the bottom.
Then Grae peeled the backing off of another heart, and we carefully placed it on top of the dowel, making sure to line up the hearts as closely as we could.
With the heart in a good position, Grae pressed everything together firmly.
Next up – the ribbon! We chose 3 colours, looped them in half, and cut them slightly shorter than the length of our exposed dowel .
Then we stacked them up and tied them onto the dowel at the base of the heart, giving them a little tug to coax them into falling downwards nicely.
Then, with a different, slightly narrower ribbon, we tied a bow right above the previous ribbon knot…
And finished off all of the ribbon ends with v snips.
And there you have it. Sparkly heart-shaped wands for Miss G’s little friends.
♥
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Making one of these sweet little ribbon wands for Miss G has long been on my project list, and since her last dance class took place today, it was the perfect motivation to not only make one for Grae, but to make one to gift to each of her little friends too.
If you poke around the internet, you’ll find tons of different styles of ribbon wands and methods to make them, but when we stumbled upon these adhesive picture hanging strips (available at hardware stores), we came up with a way of our own.
First off, we took wide satin ribbon and cut it into strips approximately 125 centimetres long, cutting one end straight across and one end at an angle. Then, using a lighter, we sealed off the cut edges.
Next, we took the adhesive backing off of the picture hangers and firmly attached them to the straight end of the ribbon. At this point I was going to sew the picture hanger onto the ribbon for added security, but the adhesive was so strong that it wasn’t necessary.
With our ribbons ready, we moved onto the wand part of the project. Using painter’s tape, we taped off our 6 inch dowels about a third of the way up.
Then using crafter’s acrylic in colours that coordinated with our ribbons, we painted the bottom third of each dowel with two coats of paint.
When the paint was good a dry, we carefully removed the painter’s tape to reveal the handle part of our wands.
Next, we used a tack to poke holes in the top ends of the dowels.
Then it was time for these guys – small eye hooks available at all hardware stores.
We screwed the eye hooks into the recently made holes by starting the process by hand and using pliers part way through. (One thing to be mindful of at this point is that if your eye hooks are on the larger side (like ours), you don’t want to force them down into the dowel too far. You’ll get a pretty good sense on when you should stop twisting, and please do so. Spoken from experience, if you force them down too much, the dowels will split open.)
Your wand should now look like this.
Now the final step… We hooked the metal picture hanging hook onto the eye hooks and use pliers to squeeze the hook shut tightly.
And there you have it – a pretty little ribbon wand.
In order to transport them to dance class without a big tangly mess happening, we simply wrapped the ribbons around the wands, and secured them with a bit of polka dotted washi tape.
♥