Create with the Library: Beaded Garden Stakes

i'm mary baker from the brunswick library and today we're filming from my garden so might be just a little bit of background noise but today we're going to talk about things that make your garden beautiful we're going to make some garden steaks we're going to make smaller ones that will go into pots like these you can see you know my grass hasn't quite come in yet so it needs a little bit of color we're also going to make some taller ones as well so come with me let's beautify all of our gardens this is such a simple craft it really only takes minutes to make we're going to make these lovely garden steaks so simple all you really need to be doing is making a curl at one end threading your beads on and a curl at the other end so what do we need for this craft we need some wire this is 16 gauge wire it's about 14 inches long you can use 14 gauge if you'd like if anything i'd go stiffer rather than less stiff because you want these to be able to hold up outside and stay straight you also need your beads i'm using uh 11 to 13 beads or so it doesn't really matter whatever colors appeal to you and then you need your tools i've got several here that are important but probably the most important one for today is going to be these round nose pliers the round nose pliers are going to be used to make both of those curls at either end so they're pretty crucial the other ones that are helpful of course are wire cutters if you decide that you want to make that a little bit shorter or longer and a pair of pliers to be able to hold your your garden stake while you are working on it these are bent nose pliers which i like a lot the other pliers i have are nylon jawed pliers not really necessary but i find i use them quite a bit when i'm working with wire they help me straighten out the wire if there are any kinks and they also are because of the nylon they don't mark up the wire and they make it a lot easier to be able to hold on to while you're making those curls so it's not necessary but kind of a nice tool to have so you're going to have to start by making your curl at the end so i'm going to start with my my round nose pliers i've got a little bit of a bend here that didn't come out so that's where i'm going to start my curl i'm going to put the wire in the pliers right at the jaw and start curling around you can see i'm moving the pliers as i'm doing that and you can either wrap just around your curl and continue to make a nice wide curl or you can wrap up the pliers and make more of a spiral all you're going to do is take your your pliers and pull that on out and you'll get a spiral somewhat like this i'm going to cut this off and show you another uh possibility for you because this one's not really my favorite this is some tough wire you'll find they're different toughness depending on what the core is obviously the outside gets changed by the whatever color they put on the outside some of the ones are copper on the inside and i find those are very malleable very easy to work with i'm going to be doing more of a spiral like this one so this is where i now i've got my curl my initial curl with my round nose pliers i'm going to be taking these nylon jaw pliers so i can hold on to it and i am just going to use my thumb and my fingers to curl around that circle and create a nice tight curl so i'm getting a tight curl there if i decide i want to have more of an open curl like that it just has more to do with the pressure that you apply with your fingers so i'm not going to be putting quite so much pressure on it and i'm getting a looser curl so that's one end now the next thing you need to do is get those beads on there i like for those of you playing paying close attention you notice that i changed beads here that is because i found my original set had too many beads that just didn't fit on the wire that is where these lovely little tools come into play we have two of them here today they come in different sizes and shapes but they all have a little bit of sandpaper kind of quality to them it's called an awl you just take that put it inside the bead and twist and it will start to ream out the center of that bead so that you'll be able to use it on your wire fortunately i had too many of those in that set so i'm using a different set these are wood beads which i do like a lot i like the look of them but unfortunately you know what happens to wood when it's out in weather it's going to change color it's going to warp so you may only get one season out of it oh well you can just make brand new ones for next year these are so easy to do but if you don't want to do that your next best choice for your when you're selecting your beads are going to be glass beads glass beads are not going to change color they're not going to warp they're going to stay pretty for many seasons unfortunately plastic beads will fade in the sun you see a lot of plastic beads on the store shelves so glass is usually your best bet for this now you can see as i've beaded these on it's sliding up my curl i don't like to do that so another thing i like to do is take my pliers and put a little bend into my curl so that's going to help keep those beads where i want instead of sliding up the curl so beads curl at one end now i'm ready to do the curl at the other end that'll hold them into place my handy dandy round nose pliers put them as close as i can to that last bead wrap my wire around i'm just going to make one loop again i'm moving my pliers as i make the loop the loop tends to be a little bit wide i don't know if you can see that so i like to use my pliers to flatten that loop down and now i'm ready with my first garden steak these are great for pots they're short and they work beautifully in pots to add some color but what if you want to put some color into your garden well then you need something a little larger so if you want to make a larger garden stick start with a coat hanger very stiff wire kind of hard to deal with you can see i didn't even straighten it out a whole lot all i did was untwist the twist at the top here straightened it out just a little bit and now i'm ready to string on my beads the nice thing about such a stiff wire is of course it will hold up to your weather so i pre-strung about two and a half to three feet of beads on beading wire very flexible wire very nice and thin wire it also allows me to do this lovely little knot at the end which i think makes this project a little bit easier i've got a knot at both ends if you did the tree of life last year or last month you would probably have a little bit of that wire left over that would work too that's 24 gauge i believe but what i used today was this beading wire so first thing you want to do is slide one of those knots right onto your wire that's going to hold one of your ends in here when i'm totally finished with this i like to put a little drop of non-water soluble glue on that's going to hold that in place even in the weather and then i'm just going to wrap my beads around very loosely at this point i'm going to tighten them up as i get a little bit later but i might as well get a few bends on here and then i'm going to take the other knot place it on the other end and slide it on as you can see still pretty floppy kind of decide where you'd like that knot to be and now you can start just winding this on and moving those twists around until you get a stake that you like then you've got some nice tall bit of beading color to go into your garden thanks for joining us for this edition of create with the library we have complete instructions below as well as a list of other possible resources for other ideas for projects and don't forget to like this video and subscribe to our youtube channel for more content every week also as a special bonus this week we've created a number of kits that we have for a limited amount of time at the brunswick library there's a link below that will allow you to reserve your kit so you can make your own garden stake thanks for joining us with crete with the library

Channel: Medina County District Library

Views: 22,317

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Id: 1CIMyyHoPf0

Length: 10min 40sec (640 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 07 2021