How to: Make a wind chime w/Sea Shells

This how-to post is brought to you buy Mother Nature! yay.

So if you've been reading my blog for a little bit then you know that we regularly head to the beach. And when doing so one of our traditions is to search for sea-shells.

So over the past couple months ive been putting the shells we've collected into a large glass jar and with Summer right around the corner {for us at least} I decided to make something with said sea shells {say that one 3 times fast....}.

One of them fancy seashell wind chime type things you see in all the beachy type stores!

It was really simple actually. Just gather your shells, a drill and a piece of wood.

The piece of wood is for when you drill the hole into the shell. You want the shell on top of the wood to not only support the shell {the wood is soft} but in case your drill bit goes a little to far, you won't damage what's underneath except the piece of scrap wood you used.

ALSO, I want to note that you don't need to live by a beach to create one of these. If you don't have beach shells readily available, they typically sell them at the dollar stores and all craft stores.

Lay your shell 'upside down' on the piece of wood and then slowly drill a hole in the middle, towards the bottom of the shell.

The drill goes through the shell pretty quickly, but make sure you keep the shell steady with one hand or else you risk cracking the shell {I know... trial and error heh}.

Find yourself a stick. A thick medium sized stick will do. We happened to have an abundance of stick in the yard and for this one instance, it actually worked out in my favor.

The purpose of the stick serves as the top piece where your shells will be hanging from.

You can keep the stick 'as-is' or you can clean it up a bit. I opted for cleaning mine up a bit. I wanted it to appear as if it were a piece of drift wood. SO... grab anything that you can easily scrape the tree bark bits off with. For mine I used a putty scraper.

We had a lot of heavy rain over the past couple days so all of the sticks in the yard are pretty water logged... normally it wouldn't look this 'dark' but all in all this is what your stick will look like once it's done being 'cleaned up'.

Now you will need some twine, or fishing line... or anything that you want to use to hang your wind chime from and also the shells to be hung from.

I used twine for this one.

Cut the length you want for the part you will use to hang your wind chime. Then tie a couple of good tight knots around each end of the stick.

Next you will use the same string you used for the hanging part of your stick, for your shells.

Loop the twine through the hole you made with the drill. For the bottom shell, tie a knot around it.. a nice tight knot. Then with the rest of the length of twine/string, loop as many shells as you want for that one piece, spacing them as close or as far apart from one another as you would like.

To add the shells, just bring the twine through the hole, then loop it around again and bring it back through the hole again. This allows you to adjust the space between each shell. No knots are needed, only for the bottom piece.

{and yes. I am wearing a 'Cars' bandaide. That's how I roll}.

Lastly- tie the top of your string of shells to the stick. Make a couple of good tight knots for extra durability.

And there you have it!

A sea-shell wind chime!

Perfect for adding a little 'beachiness' to any room or patio... or anywhere!

Luckily for me it's a little breezy out today and they really do make different sounds when they hit each other. I love the beach so I was really excited to create this project. Now we have a little something for out by the pool, to remind us of all the family trips we take to the beach to collect sea-shells :0)