I’m sure you’ve seen these before.

Known as plant stakes, fairy sticks, fairy wands, I knew I had to try making some as soon as I saw them. While I sincerely doubt there are any fairies in my garden, (or faeries, if you are keeping up with Chris Hall’s latest story from Luna’s Online), I thought they were cute, and I had just the helpers I needed to try the project.

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“My girls”, as I affectionately call them, have been a part of quite a few of my Pinterest projects. You can read about some of them here, and here. So it was with great enthusiasm that the three of us started out to make some beaded garden sticks.

Of course we had to go get some (more) beads. It’s not as if I didn’t already have plenty, but you always need more, right? And of course we needed wire. Turns out we needed stronger wire, but that’s how you learn.

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How fun is this? We actually made the garden sticks one day and then tried to make sun catchers on another day, with a certain degree of success on each.

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Thanks to the girls feeling totally comfortable picking up my phone and taking pictures when I’m not looking, I can show you the amount of concentration that went into this project.

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Just so you know, if you’re going to do this project with cats around, you have to really watch them because they will want to play with everything. For a cat who once tried to eat a broom, Foster is not one I would trust unattended around beads and wire.

It took a little experimentation to get them right, but after awhile, we had several finished.

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Even though we doubled the copper wire, they still weren’t very sturdy. We discovered that they could be bent into different shapes.

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We were so excited to “plant” them outside and see how they would look. To be honest, they didn’t stand up that straight. We realized we needed to have more wire at the bottom so they would be able to go deeper into the soil.

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After the girls left I made some more, this time making the beaded part shorter and the wire at the bottom longer. They looked okay, but I knew we needed a stronger base.

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I tried using the portrait setting on my phone to get some close up shots.

They looked pretty good for awhile, although you can see they were a little crooked.

But after a few weeks, this started happening!

I think the responsible parties were squirrels, as I really don’t have too many neighbor cats going through my yard. All I can say is, it had better not have been a raccoon!

You could say I “inherited” quite a few sturdy plant stakes from my dad, so I decided to see if I could do something with them.

In an effort to work smarter, not harder, I decided to wind the unsuccessful ones around the plant stake, rather than unstring the beads and start over.

I admit there is a lot of extra wire visible, but this was just an experiment to get the basic idea.

So far so good, it seems to be standing up well.

Here is one I made for the front yard, by stringing the beads on a wire, winding them around the stake as I went. The solar light on top looks really cute when it’s lit up at night.

So now that I know how to do it, and since I have no shortage of beads at my house, “what doth hinder me” from making a whole bunch more?

“Cool, Mom! Can I help?”