How to Make Chinese Ribbon Dance Sticks

When we do our history units for homeschool, I aim to include a craft book or kits. I love hands on activities and feel it enhances a curriculum. For this unit (including China, Ancient China and the Silk Road), I found this gem of a craft book. Lucky Bamboo Book of Crafts by Jennifer DeCristoforo is expertly laid out. The quality is superb! The book itself is high quality with thick sturdy pages spiral bound for ease of use and covered with a vibrant durable cover. You get to meet Jennifer in the opening pages of the book which I really appreciated and gave me a deeper fondness for the book and its aims. The craft ideas are simple, well explained and include step by step directions. This has been one of the most easily incorporated craft books we have used as my 10-year-old daughter started making the projects easily and on her own before we began working on projects together.The back of the book includes templates you can copy and cut out. I appreciated having that available so we could complete crafts easily and beautifully. Today's project is the Ribbon Dance Sticks. While this project was simple and quick, we did need to give ample time for the paint to dry and even more time for the glue to dry. We used 12 inch 1/4" diameter dowels (I mistakenly said 3/8" in the video) painted red using Lyra watercolors and acrylic paint. I bought 3" red ribbon, but once we started the project I noticed the ribbon size suggested was 2" to 3" inches. Given the smallness of our dowels, I paused the project and headed to a local craft store (Jo-Ann), and picked up 1.5" satin ribbon. We made ribbon sticks using both sizes of ribbon. The book suggests 54-60 inches of ribbon, but we made ours 6 feet long with one at 15 feet! I also found a 15 inch dowel with a larger diameter in my supplies, so I painted that up and used the wider ribbon on that one. Once we looked up Chinese ribbon dances we noticed that the silk or cloth or ribbon is actually much larger than 3", so you could also try making it with a long strip of silk cloth. If you adhere it carefully to a stick, you can use it temporarily without damaging the cloth, or, as an alternative, you could hold the cloth. We used our Sarah's Silks in red to try this out as an alternative. It was enjoyable learning different techniques and when you work together to choreography a dance, it looks especially beautiful. Here's an example of a Chinese Ribbon dance:    • Red Ribbon Dance   Check out the Lesson Plans for our Silk Road Unit: https://www.pepperandpine.com/product... Check out the China Blog Post https://www.pepperandpine.com/ancient... Check out the Silk Road Blog Post https://www.pepperandpine.com/the-sil... Check out the Marco Polo and Genghis Khan Blog Post https://www.pepperandpine.com/genghis... Check out the Islamic Empire Blog Post https://www.pepperandpine.com/the-gol... Check out the video playlist for the Silk Road Unit https://www.pepperandpine.com/the-gol... Check out the video playlist for the Marco Polo and Genghis Khan Unit    • Marco Polo Unit Study   Check out the video playlist for the China unit    • Ancient China Unit Study   Check out the video playlist for Islamic Empire unit    • The Golden Age of Islam   Find me here:   / pepperandpine     / pepperandpine     / pepperandpine   https://www.pepperandpine.com