Beads for Boys

When David was two and three years old, he loved making necklaces, bracelets and long, meaningless strings with pony beads. Now that he’s 5, he’s ignored the big container of beads for some time.  I had almost forgotten about the container until I found an old paper with a few patterns that could get my boy’s boy to find interesting. Sadly, the instructions for the patterns were impossible to understand, so we just decided to wing it.

We started with a Gecko.

It was actually pretty easy. David did the body on his own, and I helped out with the legs, which we just made on separate small bits of beading string and shoved the excess string into the body beads. An inelegant solution, but it turned out OK.

The trick to the body is to start with your first bead in the middle of a loooong string, then bring each side of the string through the next row, crossing back and forth through every row till you get to the single string of beads that is the tail.

The butterfly was a bit harder.

The wings took at least a half an hour to figure out how to get the string to wrap around when there was only one end. The solution was to string all the beads in a single line, then go back through the beads as they correspond to the rows in the wing.

Tomorrow he’s decided we need to figure out how to make a spider and a frog.

I’ve dug up a few other bug patterns online too, like this bumble bee, this beetle, and this ladybug.

There’s also a few to save up for next halloween, like a ghost and jack o’lantern.

I finally have some hope that we’ll get through that big container full of beads in my lifetime.

Tags: pony beads, bugs, boy craft, crafts for boys

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