Kids Craft: Easy No-bake Flour Beads

Crafts usually involve a utilitarian end-product created via specific skills. Now, Art also involves an end product, and involves techniques and skills to produce it, but is not always necessarily utilitarian. Well, except for the cultivation of human spirit, that is.

Going by the simplest yet widely-accepted definition above, some of the activities I do with the kids can be considered crafts. I am not worried about semantics. Some of the activities don't fall into one or the other easily, but, I am not finicky. If my kids had fun exploring and making new things, and I collected precious memories from it, it doesn't really matter what the academic classification of it would be.

I am rambling again... byth yn meddwl.

These flour beads don't need to be baked - just air dried. And, it doesn't harden to wooden firmness, so, a pincer grip could crumble it.



This started as a quick and quiet task for me: I was hoping to make some beads to prepare some home-grown stringing activity for Oggie. Some colorful large flour beads and shoelace was all I was hoping to throw together that afternoon.

But, watching me mix the flour immediately caught the kids' attention and they wanted to play with it. So, I let Oggie taste it, poke it, and examine it, while Ana managed to wrangle a portion of the dough from Oggie to make beads of her own.

Naturally, many interesting odd-shaped beads came about. We used chopsticks to poke holes in the center so we can later use the beads for stringing activity.

I managed to make a small batch of big beads, paint them, and put them away safely out of reach.

Ana helped paint some of the beads once they were dry. Since she is way past bead-sequencing and stringing activities, she tried making caterpillar and bead wreath and other nameless things using pipe-cleaners (Chenille stems). Now, a set of pipe-cleaners aka chenille stems is a fantastic thing to keep in the crafts arsenal...

Of course, Oggie is not quite ready for stringing and sequencing, at a few months shy of two, so, he liked un-stringing the beads :)

At the end of each session of bead play, Oggie managed to crumble a bead or two just to prove he can do it.

Items Used: All-purpose Flour, Salt, Corn Starch and Water.

I tried a few variations, and the one I am happy with is, equal parts salt and corn starch, with maybe about 1½ times flour, adding just enough warm water to knead it into a fairly stiff dough.