Paper Bracelet Tutorial!

This month I made a tutorial for My Little Shoebox' blog: a paper bracelet, using their "Up in the Trees" line. 

As much as I love to create layouts and cards, sometimes I love to create something else more! So in this case I chose to show you how to create paper beads to make a bracelet.

First we start creating the paper beads.

1. Gather your materials to create the beads: scraps of paper (I use scraps from the Up in the Trees collection), scissors, trimmer, knife & ruler, glue stick, tooth picks and either glossy accents or crackle accents (or nail polish).

2. Cut a few strips of paper of at least 7.5”long and 0.5“ wide. Because I want every bead to be different I cut a few extra strips, but 4 would be sufficient. 

3. Cut your strips at a length of 7.5”.

4. Use your knife and ruler to cut the strips diagonally so you get triangles:

5. Now roll the top of your strip of paper (the wide end) 1 time around the tooth pick and use your glue stick to glue the rest of the back of the strip of paper.

6. Roll the paper completely around the tooth pick like this:

7. Repeat this until you have 8 or 9 beads (for my arm 8 is enough). Because you didn’t add the glue to the top of the paper you can easily slide the bead off the tooth pick: 

8. Because I don’t want to damage my bracelet when washing my hands I covered the beads in a little bit of crackle accents (glossy accents or even nail polish will do too of course):

9. When using crackle accents your beads look like this:

10. To let the beads dry in stuck them in a piece of styrofoam:

Now we come to the second part of the tutorial: creating the actual bracelet!

11. Gather the rest of the supplies: (glass)beads from your stash and  elastic beading cord):

12. String the beads on the elastic cord (I use a double beading cord so my bracelet is stronger). For my arm I needed 8 paper beads, 8 metal beads and 8 glass beads:

13. Tie the ends of the beading cord together and your bracelet looks like this:

And on my arm it looks like this:

That’s it!! You’re done! Isn’t this a fun way to use your scraps??? 

And you know what?? Because this was so very easy to do, I decided to make another one, just for fun; a red/white/blue one this time, using Pebbles "Let Freedom Ring":

Thanks for stopping by my blog today if you decide to try and create a bracelet too, I would love to see it!! 

Btw, I want you to know that this isn't my own idea. I got the inspiration from a book I downloaded on my Kindle recently: "101 Crafty Gifts" by Chris Thomas.

Have a great and creative day!

Hugs,

Monique