Thursday, December 4, 2008

Homemade African Ankle Bells

I have actually decided to try and teach some music this year at our school. We are concentrating on folk music from around the world. I received help from that ladies at the 4Real Forum. They directed me to this amazing site: Putumayo World Music. This site, and our well stocked local library is all I will need for the entire school year.
Our first stop on the globe is Africa. We have been having a wonderful time learning about music from all over this large continent.
I also wanted to add musical instruments to our studies, but everything out there is soooo expensive, so I decided to make some ankle bells for the kids to enjoy from our trip to Africa.

I found a single string of bells online for $20.00, but for $4.00 and one hour of time I made a strand of bells for each of the little learners.

Wal-mart had everything I needed. I bought Christmas jingle bells, fringed edging, and red rick-rack

I strung the bells onto the fringe, folded it over and pinned it.

Then it was quite easy to sew this into place. I moved my needle over to the left to make room for the bells as I sewed.

Lastly, I sewed on the rick-rack. This added color and provided the ties for the bells.

Here is the finished, blurry, product. Children DO NOT stand still while wearing these, as you can see in the video below.

4 comments:

heavenly bliss said...

That is AWESOME. We want to come over and dance. I will check out that site. I thougth of doing something similar with our musical studies.
xoxo Jenny, Georgia and Josie

Kristi said...

That is so AWESOME!!! YOU are so awesome!!!! I will have to check that site out too:)

His Servant: Ann Kraeger said...

I want a pair of those. They sound like fun.

Rhonda said...

Those are so cute! My middle child is studying Folk Music too and we went down to the school supply store and WOW are their musical instruments expensive. We have been looking at a lot of online sites so I will have to check out the link that you posted. Thanks so much. I also loved the video of the kids dancing. They are darling!