Safety pin friendship bracelets

These safety pin bracelets are easy to make and a fun group activity.  We did this with our Brownie troop on the last meeting of the year.  In the spirit of Girl Scout sisterhood, each girl tosses her pins into a bag and everyone picks randomly to make their bracelets.

I opted to use bead spacers in between the pins because it takes a lot of pins to make one bracelet without them. The bracelets look beautiful, but we had too many other things to do at the meeting.

Materials & Tools

Safety pins (#2 work well)

Beads –small seed-beads for the pins

Beads – larger ones for spacing (optional if you’re not going to use spacers)

Elastic cord (thick cord works better)

Clothes pin

Scissors

Needle nose pliers

Step 1:  Make A LOT of beaded pins.  Each girl will need at least 20 if using spacer beads.

Open a safety pin and thread as many beads on it as you can.  Leave enough room to close the pin.  Fasten the pin & use the pliers to close the top so it doesn’t open accidentally later on. (ouch!)

Step 2:  Make your bracelet.

For a Brownie-sized bracelet, cut two 10-12” pieces of elastic cord.  Line them up evenly and loosely tie one end together, or use a clothespin to secure.  (This is just temporary so the pins don’t fall off as you string them together.)

Step 3:  String the pins onto the bracelet.

Each girl should pick at least 20 pins out of the bag.  String one cord through the head of the pin, and the other cord through the tail.  String a spacer bead onto each cord.  String another pin onto the cords, but this time, reverse the pin so that the pins alternate head to tail.  Make sure the bead sides are all facing up!

Step 4: Finish the bracelet.

Once the bracelet is long enough (one brownie-sized bracelet with bead spacers takes at least 20 pins), bring the bracelet together to form a circle.  This can be tricky, because you don’t want the pins to fall off the cords.  Untie the knot from step 2 (if applicable) and tie the top cords together & the bottom cords together.