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MACARONI MADE: STICK AND YARN ART

By Laura Miller August 26, 2016
This is a beautiful way for your kids to create some artwork that can decorate somewhere other than the refrigerator! (Grown ups have fun creating too!) You can use your kids' stick and yarn art to decorate their bedroom walls or even the yard or garden! Kids can create their art any way they choose with different yarn patterns and styles of weaving, wrapping or even just randomly stringing the yarn -- the only limit is their imaginations! Well, and maybe your yarn stash and access to sticks. Today I'll show you three different styles that simply use sticks my daughter found and scraps of yarn that grandma and I had.

Tip: If you don't personally have a collection of yarn scraps, just ask around and you'll probably find someone who does and who would be thrilled to have them put to use!



What you need:
Sticks, any shape size, as long as you can hold onto them easily while you work
Yarn, scraps and leftover bits are perfect!

What you do:

Weave
This works best with a "Y" shaped stick. Start by stringing some yarn across the open end of the Y, then weave over and under those strands vertically. You can tie or tuck in your ends, or you can just leave them loose and sticking out like my daughter did.



God's Eye
This works best with two small sticks that are approximately the same size. You can start by tying a rubber band around the center, or you can simply start weaving. Begin at the center and wrap the yarn all the way around the first stick while also wrapping over the end to hold it in place, then move to the next stick, and the next one, and so on ... until your God's Eye is as large as you'd like. Change colors by tying the ends together. Keep following the same pattern of wrapping in order to keep it even, but don't worry if you don't follow it perfectly because it's still beautiful! You can see in the picture below that my daughter lost track of her pattern a few times, but we still love the look!



Wrap
This works best with long, crooked sticks with lots of character. Begin about a foot from the bottom of the stick (especially if you're going to stick it in the ground) and simply wrap the yarn around so that each pass lies next to the last one. Change colors every 4-6 inches or so to create more interest and use different thicknesses and textures of yarn. Tie a knot at the end or have a grown up help you melt the end to the wrapped yarn.