46 Beads

Adelae's new "thing" is bracelets.  Constantly begging to wear the butterfly bracelet I made for her a couple Easters ago, I thought it might be fun to make a purple bracelet for Lent - complete with 46 beads!  Why 46?  There are 40 days in Lent, not counting Sundays.  Sundays are always a mini Easter, "a happy day"!  Add six Sundays to the 40 days of Lent and you have more than a bracelet - you have some good fine motor, counting, sorting, pattern making practice too.

I had a bunch of old mix-matched plastic beads in my bead box.  Adeale sorted them by color to find all of the purple beads.  We also found some purple wire. 

Normally I use stretchy elastic for making children's jewelry, but I thought we'd give the wire a try. The stiff wire acts like a needle, easier for small fingers stringing small beads.  The downfall of using wire is that you also need crimp beads, a clasp, and with little ones, help taking on and off the jewelry.  

Next, Adelae sorted the purple beads by shape.

Meanwhile, I made a little loop on the end of the wire and closed it off with a crimp bead.

After counting out 40 purple beads, one for each day of Lent, and gold beads for the Sundays.  Adelae laid the beads out in a six purple, one gold pattern.  Remember, the first week of Lent starts on Wednesday, so we began the pattern with four purple, one gold.  Laying out and stringing the beads was also good practice naming the days of the week.  We added a large clear crystal bead for the last Sunday, Easter.

Throughout Lent we spend a little more time studying the Bible and Catechism, so we also strung a little Bible locket in the middle of the beads.  Lent is about Jesus' taking our sin to the cross where He died the death we deserve.  It's nice to wear a little reminder of our Savior's love around your wrist, especially when you're four!

In order to make the bracelet fit properly with all those beads, we planned to for it to wrap around her little wrist twice.  Once you have your beads laid out you'll be able to get a good idea of how long you'll need the wire to be and can play with the proportions to make it best fit around the wrist.  The size of the wrist and the size of the beads can make a big difference in the size of your bracelet.

It turned out that the bracelet was big enough that it can also be worn as a single strand necklace! 

It's not every day when a last minute idea like this comes together so nicely, but I sure love it when it does!