Beads and Wire Make Sore Fingers Giveaway

We made a craft from Polish the Stars last week. I'll start by showing you their beautiful example photo:

Isn't that amazing?

Yeah, ours aren't quite that cool.

First, rings were not quite as easy to find as we'd expected so we ended up with five inch rings from Michael's Craft Store, instead of the suggested four inch. They were the kind people crochet around or use for Dream Catchers, I think. One way or the other, they look clunky compared to the wire we found easily as our local bead shop. Maybe hers were made of thinner diameter rings too?

Then, I made them with my wonderful, beautiful, creative children who really only wanted to do the beads so the trees were put together as quickly as possible - which was also not as quickly as we sort of, maybe, a little bit expected when we saw pretty small thing but didn't pay too much attention to the instructions.

You see, you start with cutting twelve wires to a certain length.  Not fast.
Then you wrap them around the ring to attach them. Also not fast.
Then you group them in threes and braid them. Not fast again.

All of those are things the children did not have the patience or inclination to do. (That could just be my children or that my children are only 9 and 5)

What they did want to do was choose beads. And only choose beads. They put up with twisting up a tree shape, but the whole time they were staring at the bead box. And then they didn't have the patience to put the beads on so they picked beads and handed them to me and I did all the attaching.

And our rings being a greater diameter than what Polish the Stars found, even our adding length didn't give great amounts of wire to work with at the end soooooo...

Without further ado, here's Little Girl's attempt.

We made hers first so the shorter wires were a big issue in this one, obvious on the side where the branches got stretched further there wasn't room for beads. And Little Girl has gone all pink and sparkly so ... let's just call this a candy tree.

This also got promptly eaten by Grimm - we suspect to punish us for leaving him home that day when I added grocery shopping to the picking up the children chore making it take longer than usual.

Little boy made this one:

He used a lot of green beads, so he did get the idea it was supposed to be a tree, but both children LOVED the letter beads and were determined to spell their names out.

Sister made one too -- about the size of a large keyring, but try as I might I cannot get a picture of that one to come out well. Even on the macro setting on the camera (which is the only setting I know about - made for small things, I think), so just know it's pretty. Probably the best of the bunch.

And I made this one:

Shown last, because I was the last one finished. Because I had to help so much with the children's. Where somewhere in the middle, when my fingers were bleeding from dealing with all those tiny wires (and my natural clumsiness), I began to wonder what I needed a beaded metal tree for anyway.

Which ended up being a good thing because, since Little Girl's is destroyed (my intention is to salvage the beads from hers and Little Boy's because they'll want to use their name letters again somewhere later) and putting mine out somewhere visible will break her heart - my tree needs a new home.

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