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.

Making Egyptian Amulets

We saw this idea about how to make an Egyptian amulet (hint: you just use air-dry clay, ha ha) and knew it would be a fun project. We had just been listening to a P.G. Wodehouse audiobook (this one, to be precise) which featured, quite prominently, a stolen Egyptian scarab (of the 4th Dynasty), so the children were all quite pleased to be able to make our OWN scarabs.

The air-dry clay isn't the MOST sturdy of media to work with, but it was at least easy to mold, and we all liked our finished amulets. Malachi may have liked his lucky owl most of all. He wore it around for several weeks and said it brought him great power and good fortune.

Sebby's monkey amulet (or "monkulet")

Junie's bunny

Some ankhs and a scarab.

DNA structure/ Making DNA bead necklaces

We absolutely loved making these DNA models with seed beads. In fact we liked it so much that I ended up going back to the store and getting more bead colors so we could all make a bunch more of them on subsequent days. They were just fun to make! And easy enough that, once we got the hang of it, even 5-year-old Daisy was able to do it on her own. (Although, admittedly, Daisy always has been unusually good at—and had a lot of patience for—fine motor activities.) The instructions we used are here. I found I only needed to go through about three rows with the children before they could do it totally independently.

The nice thing about these models is that they are quite accurate, though simple, and they really get across the idea of the matching base pairs. And, if you accidentally pair the wrong bases—just call it a mutation! :) Sebby made quite a few mutations on purpose in his keychains, each causing a different trait ("This one made me have red eyes! This one means I have six fingers!" etc.).

Here is a great overview video that talks about the structure of DNA.

We made both keychains and necklaces out of our bead-DNA. I think the necklaces are so beautiful! The double-helix shape can be flattened if you aren't careful, but it's easily re-twisted if necessary.

To make these, you just need two colors of seed beads in size 6/0. These will make up the sugar/phosphate "backbone" of the DNA's double helix.

And you need two colors of longer bugle beads in size #3. We used the twisted bugles because they are sparkly and pretty. :) These will be your C,T, G, A bases, so before you start, decide which colors will always pair with each other:

 Then you just need some 32-gauge wire:

Then follow the step-by-step instructions here.

Happy makers. As I said, we couldn't get enough of this. It's very relaxing to sit around stringing beads and talking.

Malachi made keychains and necklaces for all his friends in his church class. So cute.

Daisy's pretty necklace

This was my favorite set of colors. I kept one of these to wear myself! I love it.