Hello, everyone! This is my first Pin-tried, or rather Pin-spired (see what I did there?) post! Because I’m an elementary education major, I’m currently taking a class on teaching music to children, and I had a project in which I had to create an original instrument from found materials that made a loud and clear sound and was aesthetically pleasing. After driving myself nuts for a whole day and coming up with nothing, I decided to resort to that holy grail of good ideas, Pinterest. You can find my inspiration for my instrument here! I wound up creating amazing sounding bells from flower pots! This is a really simple, easy project that you could do as a teacher or with the kids!
Materials Needed:
4 ceramic flower pots (with a hole on each bottom!) of varying sizes
4 tiny ceramic flower pots (with a hole on each bottom!) of the same size
some shoelace-type rope
scissors
rhinestones, stickers, and other decorations
Instructions:
1) First, cut your thin rope a decent length (you want it to be a little too long and trim it rather than it be too short!!). Feed your rope through the hole of one of the mini pots. Tie a good number of knots from the inside of the pot. You should be able to hold the top of the string and your little pot will safely dangle from the bottom.
2) Feed the top of your string through the first pot. While holding the string, hold your larger pot and ring your bell. Figure out where you would like to tie your knots to get your desired sound. (When I hold my bells, the little pot sticks out a little from the bottom. When the little pot is too far in, it will scrape along the sides of the larger pot inside of strike the sides.)
3) Tie a good number of knots. Your knots should be on top of your larger pot, like in the picture above.
4) Ring your bell! It should sound loud and clear. If you are not happy with its sound, undo your latest knots and readjust your pots and then re-knot.
5) Repeat the process with your remaining pots.
6) Decorate your flower pot bells! Go wild!
I hope that you enjoy your bells and get really creative with them! Different shapes of pots will create tons of different sounds! My yellow bell (the second from the left) makes a slightly different sound from the others because of its more narrow shape, which was really interesting! This is my first major teaching project, and I can’t wait to do more!!
Writer from the Block 