Braided newspaper bracelets

This craft idea is sponsored by Cleverpatch

One art material my kids and I have been loving lately is liquid watercolours. The colours are amazingly bright and the consistency is just like painting with water. They are beautiful for use in process art and I have found that the artworks we’ve created with them have made a fantastic material to work into craft projects as well. Last year we used liquid watercolours to create some colourful bookmarks as gifts and we also used them for our arty advent calendar in the lead up to Christmas.

Today I’m sharing an easy braided paper bracelet that has been created with newspaper coloured with liquid watercolours. They look a little quirky but are lots of fun to make and my kids love them.

You will need

• Liquid Watercolours
• Newspaper
• Coloured yarn
• A sponge brush or alternatively a soft, big watercolour paintbrush
• Also recommended is a plastic table cover to protect the furniture

Colouring the newspaper 

 

Tear up single folded sheets of newspaper into wide strips, I made a huge pile using many sheets but didn’t end up painting them all. Use your sponge brush to paint each sheet of newspaper and hang to dry on a clothes rack. The bottom left hand image in the collage above is showing a glitter liquid watercolour, which we wanted to try out just for fun. They came out just like the regular colours only with a bit more sparkle, and my girls are always attracted to sparkly things so it was a hit at our place.

 

You’ll be left with a rainbow of newspaper to work with to create your bracelets. The possibilities for use with the coloured strips are endless, so if you have any leftover don’t throw them away!

 

1) Select three coloured strips and first roll them into a tube before twisting them to make your bracelet strands
2) Tie at the top with yarn, wrapping the yarn around many times so that you get a nice fat band of colour
3) Braid the strands together and tie off at the other end when you think the length is about right for your wrist (or your child’s wrist)
4) Tie both ends together and wrap the yarn around and around both strands to form a circle that becomes your bracelet
5) To finish, trim the ends of the newspaper and gently stretch them apart to form a bow shape

 

Easy peasy! I’ve even kept the off cut scraps from trimming the bow to use in future projects (they would go great in an art collage).

 

 

We love how they turned out, and it always feels good to create treasure from trash don’t you think?

 

More fun craft ideas that kids can wear

• Make a foil tiara and matching bangle for pretend play
• These paper scrap crowns turned out so well!
• Use shrinky plastic to create kid-made shrink art charms
• Use our printable template to create cool superhero masks
• Make a black cat costume from egg cartons

 

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