Clay Beads

We made our beads out of natural clay, but you can use any clay that will dry or can be baked... you may even want to try a simple salt dough!

We rolled the clay into little balls. We squeezed and pressed it into squares. We dented in rows with the side of a skewer. We sliced it with butter knives, and we sliced and pressed it with combs... small teeth and large. Lots of interesting textures!

Soon we had a small collection of beads. Hearts, stars, round, square...We left them to dry overnight.

"I'm going to make a rainbow!" announced Madeleine. She did indeed. We painted some with a paintbrush. We rolled a few round beads around on a plate with a couple of tiny puddles of paint.

Then we thought that we'd like a few marbelized square ones, so we had the idea to dab the paintbrush to saturate it, then splatted the paint into a snack cup. We tossed in the squares, (whoops--make sure to lock the lid down tight!) and shook them about inside the cup. We rinsed it out and added two more colors. (Oh, so pretty! We had to rinse and repeat a whole lot of times!)

Oh, no! We were out of beads to paint already! We let them dry.

They're beautiful.

Now we only need to string them and show off our gorgeous works of art.