Edible necklace

[H and K]

Hi all, we are struggling with our annual contributions to the local village show. The pattern is always me letting the children sign up for loads of things because it is summer and we have lots of time, and I let them choose difficult things because I am certain we can do them. Suddenly we are here and as always I can't do any of it because I am the least crafty person in the world and we have no time left. So please help...main things stuck with are making a totally edible necklace (x2) and making vegetable or fruit animals. Trying desperately not to use red shoe laces or sweets for the edible necklace, but not sure spaghetti or similar would work? Any ideas...please?

[Lily]

What about chives as string? You could make beads from carrot pennies, cucumber slices, chunks of sweet pepper.

[H and K]

Hi Lily, fab idea. Could knot some pieces together, think we'd better get practising!

[Treeb]

Does the string have to be edible? I would probably just use normal string x and only make the beads edible. You could use O shaped cereal like Cheerios or a fruity type for something more colorful. Or you could string popcorn like for a Christmas tree.

[H and K]

It all has to be edible, not sure why I agreed to this now! Thanks for the ideas.

[Kitcameron]

Could you string grapes together to make a very hungry caterpillar with a cherry tomato head, raisins for eyes and something for legs?

[H and K]

I like the idea KC, thank you. We're only guiding the creation, LOs will put it together and I think they will love the caterpillar idea.

[EnigmaFish]

I've seen cute fruit animals made with toothpick legs and pineapple feet. Would that be allowed?
Trying to make a necklace which is completely edible sounds hard. I can't think of anything to use as edible string! What about dental floss? It isn't, strictly speaking, edible but it does goes in your mouth and it is useful to have around after a meal.

[H and K]

EnigmaFish, I like it! Not sure if we'd get away with dental floss or not although it'd be a whole lot easier than anything else, but you've just solved the problem we had of not knowing how to fix things together. Toothpicks ingenious, thank you.

[EnigmaFish]

Haha, glad I could help.
I just logged back in to make another suggestion for the edible necklace: dandelions. They're edible, right? If you get nice long stems, you can plait them like a daisy chain.
Admittedly, it's not the season for dandelions. Celery stalks? You know how you can peel the strings from the celery? They're not tasty, but they are edible and durable and again, you could plait them.

[H and K]

I shopped the vegetable aisle with new eyes yesterday - celery is on my list! Going to try a few things today. I hadn't thought of plaiting them, thank you for the idea. I wish I was good at this instead of finding it so hard, but it's a very excited house today which makes it worth it. Thanks everyone for taking the time to help x

[H and K]

Thank you again to everyone. We had a really wonderful day at the show. We entered quite a few things and won several prizes. The chives necklace won a first prize! And a sweet potato and parsnip elephant H and K made won exhibit of the show (they got a cup for it!!) One of the comments we got from the judges was they could tell the entries were made by the children, I'm so glad I resisted interfering as it is so tempting to make helpful suggestions from an adult perspective. Gosh, I was proud of them both.

I'm already planning next year!

[EnigmaFish]

Glad we could help, and hooray for H and K!

[Lily]

Yay! So pleased chives worked! And I can just picture the cuteness of a parsnip elephant's trunk.

[Kitcameron]

Yey, well done.