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Supported by Victorinox

Make wooden jewellery

Create your own wooden jewellery and sharpen your knife skills at the same time.

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You’ll need

  • String
  • Wooden skewers
  • Knives or wood saws - for cutting wood
  • Small twigs, around 2cm in length

Before you begin 

  • Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. There’s also more guidance to help you carry out your risk assessment including examples.
  • Make sure all young people and adults involved in the activity know how to take part safely.
  • Make sure you’ll have enough adult helpers. You may need some parents and carers to help.   

Planning and setting up this activity 

  • Take some time to go through knife safety with the adult volunteers and young people before starting this activity. Read our knife safety guidance. You can also find more knife safety resources on our Victorinox supporter page. 
  • This activity needs branches that have a soft core that can be removed or that already have a hole in the centre. A good example of this is Willow, Dogwood or Elder.  
  • You could create an example of a necklace or bracelet to show everyone during the meeting. 

Making your necklace or bracelet

  1. Explain to everyone that they'll have the opportunity to create a necklace or bracelet out of wood. 
  2. Start by giving each person some string. Ask them to measure out the length of necklace or bracelet they would like to make and cut the string to length. Encourage everyone to make the string a bit longer to start with, so they can trim it down when they're close to finishing. 
  3. Ask everyone to tie a small twig to one end of their string. This will act as a stopper to stop the beads from falling off, and also as a fixing point for when you are tying the two ends of the jewellery together. 
  4. Next, it's time to create the beads. Give each person a knife or wood saw and ask them to cut up their branches into 1.5cm long chunks. Make sure you have enough adult volunteer support during this step. 
  5. When they have enough chunks for their jewellery, give them a wooden skewer. Explain that they need to carefully remove the soft core from each chunk, by pushing it out with the skewer. If needed, people can wear protective gloves with grips to help with this part. 
  6. After they have de-cored their wooden chunks, they can thread them onto their string.  
  7. When they've added enough beads on their string, they can tie the two ends of the string together and trim off any excess string. 
  8. Finally, everyone can wear and enjoy their handmade wooden jewellery if they wish. 
Hands holding three sticks and a penknife
Hands cutting sticks of different colour into short segments with a penknife
Removing the core of a stick with a skewer
Hands threading a hollow piece of wood onto string.
Hand holding the complete necklace made of segments of coloured wood.
Girl in a woodland wearing the finished necklace.

Images taken from "Crafting with your Pocket Knife" by Victorinox and AT Verlag. 

Reflection

This activity gave everyone the chance to be creative, try something new, and make their own choices in designing their jewellery. Have you made anything like this before? Did you enjoy making it? Would you create something different next time?

This activity also gave everyone the chance to develop their knife skills. How did this activity help you develop these skills? How could what you've learned be useful in a survival situation? 

Safety

All activities must be safely managed. You must complete a thorough risk assessment and take appropriate steps to reduce risk. Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. Always get approval for the activity, and have suitable supervision and an InTouch process.

You must run your activities in line with the Safeguarding Code of Conduct for Adults (Yellow Card) and report any concerns to the UK HQ Safeguarding Team.

Sharp objects

Teach young people how to use sharp objects safely. Supervise them appropriately throughout. Store all sharp objects securely, out of the reach of young people.

To make it easier, you could buy wooden beads instead of making your own. 

Make it accessible

All Scout activities should be inclusive and accessible.

Scouts Survival Skills Activity Badge

Now that you've made a piece of jewellery for yourself, could you make one for someone else? Or why not create more to sell as part of a fundraising activity?