Making Egyptian jewelry

There are many, many good ideas out there for making Ancient Egypt-style jewelry! And we tried several of them. I never thought I would voluntarily have my children do an art project involving spray-painted macaroni, for example, but we found these cool-looking snake-y cuffs to make…and then the variant looked so pretty here…that I swallowed my objections! Anything is better with gold spray-paint, it seems. (And we went through a couple cans of it during this unit!)

Here's a page showing how to make Egyptian collars. A variation is here. We used lids to some take-out containers we had, since they were a little flatter than paper plates, but either would work. You can just use anything you have on hand to decorate them (if you balk at macaroni…ha ha) and we have a huge box of these jewel-y sort of things, so that's mostly what we used.

Maybe my favorite thing we made were these circlets with the royal serpent sign. (This same site shows a pretty variation on the armlets/cuffs.) They are just so simple and elegant, I think. The girls could not WAIT to wear them for our Egyptian celebration!

The boys liked wearing theirs too. But real Pharaohs don't smile, of course.

Here is my very favorite collar—the one Sebastian made. It looks geometric and cool, but upon closer examination you can see it is a road- and sign-themed piece of jewelry. Sebastian, as you may remember, really loves roads and road signs, so…naturally…he would make his Ancient Egyptian jewelry reflect this interest. You can see he has included: stop signs and yield signs, flashing "caution" lights, lane lines, bridges, and an impressive array of every type of common traffic light including the "left turn on arrow only" versions.

Oh, Sebastian. How I love that boy.