St. Pat's Extra Mom

With nothing new to talk about these days, I suppose I could talk about being an extra mom on St. Pat's.  I mean, it kind of goes along with a healthy lifestyle ... being a green themed holiday and all, right?!

If you haven't read any of my "extra mom" posts yet, just to get you up to speed: I've mentioned in a few previous posts that I try to send fun things to daycare for the staff that takes care of my son - most recently, that meant sending year of the dog themed gift bags for Lunar New Year and heart in a bottle necklaces for Valentines Day.

Since those two holidays were kind of a big gift day from a financial perspective, and being that I was somewhat uninspired for St. Pat's (due not wanting to send the staff a bunch of junk food), I decided to keep this gift simple and go handmade.

Having no idea what to make, somehow I settled on paracord knot tying.  Don't ask me why.

Yes - I do mean these things ... that may or may not have already gone out of style.  But ... I promise my version was cute, ok?!

First, using this YouTube tutorial, I made some green paracord bracelets with shamrock charms.  FYI - the shamrock charms I used are sized for a knock of Pandora bracelet, in case you're interested in using them for other applications.

To save the cost of typical plastic snap closures, and to avoid fit/sizing issues, I adapted the bracelets I made to be a bangle style with a knot and loop closure.  If you want to try making this bracelet yourself - since I had trouble with the globe shaped knot in that first video link, this tutorial may be helpful for you as well. 

Although I forgot to take a nice picture of the finished product, you can get a general idea of how the bracelet turned out here ... even though I hadn't trimmed and sealed the stray ends yet.

As you can see, I likely erred on the side of too large with my bracelet.  Whoops.  Though it looked cute stacked over my watch, it was too large alone.  I would recommend going slightly smaller and more fitted on the wrist to anyone trying this themselves.

Anyway - of course, just a bracelet would never be enough of a gift for me.  Hahaha.  Trying to come across somewhat St. Patrick's themed, I wrapped each bracelet in a small piece of shinny gold tissue paper to make it look like a sack of gold, and tied each to a bottle of strawberry kiwi ice.

Like I said, I didn't remember to take finished pics this time ... so you'll have to use your imagination a bit for this post.  But I promise, the end result was cute enough to meet my usual standards.

So there you have it ... if you want to get rope burns on your fingers and break a few nails in the name of a non-relevant holiday, now you have some inspiration!  So go hop to it!