Art for Kids: How to Make a Necklace From Drinking Straws

Video Transcript

"For this clip we're going to make a colorful necklace that you can wear. For this easy job, you need some card, a hole punch, scissors, some string or elastic and some drinking straws. You have a needle, thread it up, quite a long length of thread, and for the first thing, gets a short length of straw, push it through and tie it. I'll show you how to cut the lengths of straws because with them being plastic, they tend bounce or hound a little bit. You have to be careful not to loose them, so I've done two knots on the first piece of straw so nothing else will fall off the end of the string knot. Here's the straws, you can probably put two together and hold them very firmly, got them evenly match and I'm holding them so they don't bounce away, there. It makes a lovely noise as you do it. Chop them off into the length you want. "Oopps, that's when they go bouncing". That's why I'm holding them between those two fingers. But be careful you don't chop your fingers at the same. Right. So that's plenty of straws. Now you might want to think of a pattern as you go along. I'm going to try and make an alternating color pattern. So I've got pink to start with, so the next one's going to be yellow. And then I'll do another pink one and then another yellow one. So we'll go pink, yellow, pink, yellow and then I'm going to put one of these spacers on. This is just a piece of card, we just punch some holes in to make it look more interesting. So put the punch hole through there. I think I'll go back to pink, yellow and then another spacer. You can make up whatever pattern you like. You could make a necklace to match all your different t-shirts. Another pink, another yellow and another spacer. Can we see how it's starting to look like, it's a funky necklace. I think now I'm going to change the pattern and do some purple ones 'cause I like purples, my favorite color. One, two. So I've got three purple ones, that will be about the middle of the necklace, add a sense of unique . So now I need to go back and repeat the pattern backwards. I've got back to the black. I'm looking at one side of the necklace, I'm trying to copy it. So back to yellow, now it's going to be pink and then a spacer and hopefully it look nice when you put it around your neck, right. Pink, spacer, now back to yellow, another pink, another spacer. And I'm nearly finish back to the beginning. Pink, yellow, "oopp, it's yellow first", then the pink and then at last spacer. And we're finish off with the yellow, pink, yellow. And because I'm using elastic, you'll be able to tie this one off. If you haven't got elastic, you have to make a long necklace that'll go over your head without stretching. Right, I don't need the needle anymore. So pull the needle out, back to the beginning and look at that for a pretty necklace. That will just fit. There we go. That's how to make a colorful, funky necklace."