Crafting Flower Leis with Kids

How to Make a Beaded Lei Necklace with Kids

As you may know, I am a Mom to a 3-year-old boy, who loves to be creative. I have been designing art activities for years and he is always very interested to see what project we will do next! Often, I create activities for private events and workshops, which is very inspiring for me. For a recent event, I designed a custom lei necklace craft for kids! It is both simple and fun, so I wanted to share it with you. Also, it entertained my son at home for 30 minutes and I think it will entertain the kids in your life!

Here is how you can make a simple lei necklace for a birthday party or for an easy afternoon craft. 

Read on to see what supplies we used and how you can make this one with your kids too!

For this project, I used:

• Colorful wooden beads
• Smoothie straws, I like these for the larger opening
• Yarn laces, although I have been using these plastic tip yarn laces for years, I found these plastic laces at that craft store that work even better for small hands! 
• Tissue paper flowers
• Fabric collage flowers

Note: For the flowers you can make your own flowers out of lightweight paper or coffee filters for a color diffusing effect, it 's up to you! For this project, I decided to order fabric flowers, simply because it was for a poolside event and I wanted them to hold up nicely if they got wet. 

Here the straws and smoothie beads are all mixed up on the same tray. I recommend starting with the bead work, stringing a handful of beads and straws before adding a flower here and there. ​

I find stringing a pattern of some sort: bead, straw, bead, flower looks nice, because traditional tropical leis have space between each flower. Placing a large flower with a smaller flower inside also looks nice too! I like to let the kids have fun, after showing them a few beading strategies. 

All of the flowers need to have a hole punched through them. If you are super serious about hole punching, then you may want to try out this one! I have used it for years and it never bends or breaks.  As you can see the lei necklaces turn out colorful and charming! I would recommend this project for ages 3 and beyond, as it requires find motor skills, patterning and some attentiveness. I feel like older kids could have stunning results with painting their own papers. 

I hope you have enjoyed this crafting with kids post, please follow A Day in the Studio, for other ideas and projects like this. If this post, made you want to take a vacation to Kauai, then check out my Kauai travel guide too!

If you would like to see more craft-based projects like this, let me know in the comments below. Although, I am always creating, I love to hear exactly what your favorites are that I share. I'd love to hear about your latest adventures with kids and crafting.