Princess Jasmine Bangles ⋆ Sugar, Spice and Glitter

Ella is gearing up for her Princess Jasmine birthday party this weekend, and so the Jasmine and Aladdin crafts and snacks are in overdrive! These are one of my favorite kids’ crafts that we have done yet – Princess Bangles made of cardboard tube and dried pasta!

This was one of those crafts that you have to leave and come back to a few times to let all of the pieces dry, so while it’s not a time-consuming craft, it’s not completed quickly. These types of crafts work really well for us – Ella loves to do a bit of crafting in the morning before school when we won’t have time for a full craft, so crafts with several “components” allow us to do little bits in the small blocks of time we have on busy weekdays.

One thing that I love about this craft is that you can really use whatever you have on hand – the only semi-essential material is gold paint, and even then, you can easily swap that for any color (they just might not be Jasmine-inspired).

How to Make a Princess Bangle Craft

First, assemble your materials:

empty chip can, or large paper towel tube
marker
scissors or knife (for adult use)
glue
gold paint
dried pasta, several varieties
acrylic gems
glitter, optional

You can swap out the pasta and gems for whatever materials you’d like to create a raised design with – yarn, bottle caps, shells, etc.

Start out by measuring out how wide you’d like each bracelet to be – Ella used her wrist to give her a guide, marking where I should cut the container for her.

For ease, I cut down one side of the can and then cut the strips off from that.

Ella used 3 different shapes of pasta and figured out how she wanted to lay them out. I helped with this stage because it was time consuming – and it allowed us to experiment with using regular clear glue and hot glue. The hot glue was a lot easier and less frustrating as the bracelets with the clear glue couldn’t be done in one attempt – we’d have to let one side of the bracelet dry before turning it over to work on the other side.

Ella has a hot touch glue gun that I feel comfortable letting her use, but

Let the pasta dry completely to the cardboard roll. We did this as Ella was at school for 6 hours, but it was probably dry enough within 2 hours (less time if you let them dry outside – though we have a squirrel who loves to steal crafts with food items attached, so we dried ours indoors).

Choose your paint and cover the pasta and cardboard roll thoroughly. Our bracelets took two coats of paint before they were that rich, glossy gold that we were going for.

While the paint was drying, Ella broke out the gems and figured out what patterns she wanted on her bracelets. (This is a great way to incorporate math concepts into crafting – a sneaky thing that I started which Ella loves.)

Glue the acrylic gems to the bracelets and let dry. Again, because you are dealing with a 3D curved object, regular glue can be a bit frustrating and the items may shift – so you may want to go for a hot glue or a stronger glue.

Let dry (you can add a coat of acrylic sealer but we rarely bother with things like that).

And there you have it: a gorgeous princess bracelet even Princess Jasmine would approve of!

We paired ours with our Princess Jasmine costume, but we will attempting our own Princess Jasmine tank tops at the birthday party so if they turn out well, I’ll share those with you, too!

While the bracelets were a little big for Ella’s arm, we were able to tuck one edge under the other for a tighter fit while she was playing in the backyard – and they are the perfect fit for her princess dresses with sleeves, or dressing up a boring sweater when that season comes.

If your little princess would want to wear these out of the house or be upset at them falling off, you can either use a smaller cardboard tube (best option) or poke two holes (one of either side of the bracelet) and use a string to make them a tighter fit.

This was a fun, low-key project with a lots of room for creativity. We’re a pro-Disney family so anytime we can add a bit of Pixie Dust in with our craft supplies, I’m all for it! This craft could easily be modified to make Egyptian or Arabic-style bracelets as part of a cultural study.