Friendship Bracelets!

Emma is in love with bracelets lately. She has been begging her older cousins to let her wear their beaded bracelets whenever she sees them. Last week, while I was working at the Children's Center on campus, I learned how to make some easy twisty friendship bracelets. The teachers there were making them with 4 and 5 year old kids, but I thought, "My kid can do this." So I dug out the old bin of embroidery floss Karen & I used to use when we were little to make bracelets. Back in our day, you had to repeatedly tie individual knots on multiple strings and the bracelets took at least an hour to make. These ones work on twisting... you hold a few strings together and twist, then fold the entire thing in half and twist the opposite way. At the end, you shake the whole thing and, as it tries to untwist itself, it actually winds up more! Definitely easy enough for a two year old to help with. We also use it as an excuse to practice our numbers. I tell her, "Okay, we have to twist till we get to 20," and then we count! Emma loves choosing out her colors of embroidery floss and helping to twist and then shake the result. We have made a few this week and we took the materials to the Valentine's playdate at Sophia's house to show our friends too. Then this weekend the cousins spent the night and the girls (all four of them, from age 2 to 15) sat together weaving bracelets. Awesome...