Gift of Friendship

The festival season is in full swing and brings to my mind all those hippy-type crafts I used to do in my younger days.  Friendship bracelets were very popular in the 70s and I remember making lots of different designs using all sorts of materials - coloured cord, macrame string, leather, glass beads, crochet yarn, safety pins, etc, etc.  I thought I'd make some for selling at my sister's fund raiser next Saturday.

I found an easy how-to for these pretty woven bracelets here.  They are much simpler to create than they look and all you need, apart from the cord, is a circle of cardboard.  I made one in about 20 minutes.  Traditionally friendship bracelets are tied onto the wrist but I wanted to make them get on and offable and experimented with fastenings.  I used some jewellery findings and added little lobster claws with jump rings but I also like the button fastening I adapted from this tutorial.   

As you can see I added little 'made with love' charms too and packaged some up ready for selling.  Blogger Michael Ann has used embroidery silks for her bracelets but I've used 1mm nylon Chinese Knotting Cord which is easy and cheap to buy on ebay.  You can melt the ends of the cord carefully with a lighter or tealight to stop them fraying and I also slightly melted the end knots to stop them loosening with wear as the cord is quite slippy. 

I originally bought the cord to make these traditional macrame friendship bracelets for my great niece's birthday the other week - how-to here.  She'd seen older girls in school making them to raise money for charity and wanted a few more to add to her wrist.  I made this little zipped pouch for her too as some gorgeous woven ribbons I'd ordered on Etsy finally arrived from China!  They were worth the wait of 3-4 weeks - so pretty!  I might just have to order some more! 

If you haven't made them before I hope you'll try some friendship bracelets - they are an easy portable project and just right to keep hands, young and old, busy whilst sitting in the sun.