Suncatcher Windchimes

I got my inspiration from www.crafter.org.  I took it one step further and made windchimes with our suncatchers.  This is a super easy project if you can tolerate the funky smell coming from your oven.  lol.  It's a bit weird but, it's over quickly and I sprayed some air freshener afterwards and all was good.  I would suggest putting them in the oven and spending some time outdoors while they are in the oven, just remember to take your kitchen timer with you!!!  

Click Read More for the How To...

Materials

A bunch of translucent colored pony beads

Cupcake and mini cupcake pans

Misc. cans

How To
1.  Have your little ones start placing the beads in the bottom of the pans.  You want only a thin layer so one bead high is good.  (For the windchime that we made, we needed 6 big cupcake discs and 18 little cupcake discs.)

I made a ring using 2 cans for the top of our windchimes.  

2.  Bake at 400°F for 20 minutes or so.  The ones on the top rake took a bit longer.  I took the bottom ones out and moved the top ones to the bottom to finish up.

3.  Let them cool completely.  You will actually hear cracking as they cool.

4.  Once cooled, flip the pans over and pop them out.  Some of them needed a bit of help (by hitting the pan) but it wasn't too bad.

The ring was a bit tricky to get out.  The rim of the inside can caused a bit of trouble.  I ended up having to break the ring to get it off.  Note to self:  Next time use can without ridge on the rim.  Good thing, the ring was easily glued and I even have trouble finding where it was broken.

5.  I drilled 6 holes in the ring, equally spaced apart.


6.  I decided on a design of 3 strings (little disc, little disc, big disc, little disc) and 3 strings (little disc, little disc, little disc, big disc) that I would alternate.

So I drilled holes into the discs accordingly.  The discs that would be at the bottom would only need one hole each, this would be 3 big discs and 3 little.  All other discs would get 2 holes (top and bottom), this would be 15 little discs and 3 big.

7.  I used fishing line and tied the discs together in the pattern that I decided on.

8.  I attached the strings to the ring and left extra line at the top.

9.  I took all 6 lines and tied a knot, then made a loop for hanging and tied another knot.

And here you have it....