Bubble Wands

Do children ever grow out of bubbles? There's few sights so dreamy as glistening bubbles floating up to a blue sky, and no laughter so cheeky as when children jump up to pop them. Is it time to get the bubbles out?

To make your own bubble wands you will need: Pipe cleaners & Beads

There's no hard and fast way to make bubble wands - as long as you've got a shape to blow the bubbles through and a handle to hold it, you've made a bubble wand! We experimented with different bead and pipe cleaner combinations, and with a good Bubble Mix they will all make beautiful bubbles.

Depending on the length of your pipe cleaners you may need to join some together to form your shape. We were using the 18cm cotton pipe cleaners from Conscious Craft, leftover from our Spooky Spiders, and found that we could join two together simply by putting the ends into the same bead, and it held. We were mostly using the 12cm beads from Grimm's, which is a common size for wooden beads.

When it comes to joining your shape to your handle, (which we made by stringing lots of beads along a pipe cleaner), we found that you could actually fit three ends of pipe cleaners into a bead if necessary, making it even more secure.

At the end of your handle you can bend the pipe cleaner up and tuck it into the bead above.

Of course you can make bubble wands any time but it made such a lovely summer party activity for us.

The children came up with so many more ideas than I did for different ways of making them.

The big loop on the left was made as per the examples given at the beginning of the blog, the stars with the help of a biscuit cutter shape, and the double loop one is circles made by 18cm pipe cleaners, held together by the bead in the middle.

The hearts were the simplest of all, with both ends of the pipe cleaner fed into the top of the handle and the top of the loop pushed downwards.

And how about this clover?! I never would have dared but it worked really well.

Off we went to the park with our bubble mix and to my great relief the colour on the beads didn't run or fade, and each of the shapes made fabulous bubbles. (The pipe cleaners also dried to looking good as new afterwards!).

All that was left to do was have some fun, and my question was answered: no, children never grow out of bubbles.

Check out our Dr Zigs Bubbles or the Sand, Water & Bubbles collection which is part of our Outdoor Play.