These rainbow friendship bands make perfect gifts for kids to share with friends for Valentines, St Patrick's Day, or any day just to share a smile. All you need are a few wooden lolly sticks.
We recently made several of these & they were such a hit with the kids who made them as well as those who received them.
To make them you'll need:
Large wooden popsicle
Heart shaped buttons or white felt
Coloured sharpie markers.
Start by soaking the popsicle sticks in a bowl of boiling water for a couple of hours. The sticks should be fairly pliable at this stage, but if not, soak for another hour or so in more hot water.
To create a curved shape, try gently & steadily bending the sticks one at a time. If the sticks are too rigid & you can't feel any give in them, then they'll need a longer soak in the water. Shaping the sticks takes a little practice & patience, it works best when you manipulate them slowly before placing each one in a glass for it to set. We left them to dry overnight & when removed from the glass they had transformed into their new rounded shape.
To create the rainbow designs we used sharpie markers as they gave us a neat finish & prevented the colours from seeping into each other. Acrylic paint would also work well, but we found the pens gave us an instant result.
You could leave your rainbow friendship band like this, but we chose to add some clouds to the base of our rainbow.
As these were friendship bands we thought instead of using the classic cloud shape for our rainbow clouds we would use heart-shaped buttons & heart shapes cut from white felt. We secured these with a glue gun just to make sure they remained intact when the friendship band was worn.
Then our bands were ready to wear & share!
What a cute way to say:
'Thanks for being a friend'
'There's always HOPE'
'Thanks for the JOY you bring to the world'.
'Thanks for the JOY you bring to the world'.
