Pipe cleaner Christmas ornaments 🎄✨ Unleash festive creativity with your kids!

These pipe cleaner Christmas ornaments are a great preschool beading craft for the holiday season. There’s no glue, no glitter, and very little mess to clean up. The kids will have fun picking up the beads and learning to thread them onto the pipe cleaner.

The best part about this is that you barely need any materials for this easy Christmas craft! The only materials needed are pipe cleaners, beads, and some string or ribbon to hang your ornaments! Keep reading to see how we made them.

These are also one of the 14 adorable Christmas crafts for kids that we’ve made lately, in case you’d like to check those out too!

Supplies: Pipe Cleaner Bead Ornaments Craft

December is a great time for crafting. Making ornaments for the tree is a fun way to add a personal touch to your festive decorations (and keep the little ones busy!). Plus, stringing beads onto the pipecleaners is a great way for your little ones to practice fine motor skills!

Here are the supplies for this preschool pipe cleaner bead ornament craft:

Pipe cleaners
Wooden beads (we chose assorted sizes)
Scissors
Ribbon

Gather the supplies together prior to starting this project. It can also be nice to have a tray to work on to catch any runaway beads! And with all preschool Christmas ornament crafts (and everything lol), ensure you read and follow all the instructions prior to starting. Full supervision is also a must!

How to make wooden bead and pipe cleaner ornaments

Here is how to make these wooden bead and pipe cleaner ornaments with preschoolers:

Bend the end of one pipe cleaner to keep the beads from falling off.
- If you choose to make a shape with an open end (unlike ours, which is a circle), you’ll want to twist the pipe cleaner end around the first bead to secure the beads.
Thread beads onto the pipe cleaner, one by one.
Periodically bend the pipe cleaner into a circle shape.
Stop adding beads when there are enough to go around in a circle (usually about 10). It’s ok to take off some beads if there are too many!
Twist the ends of the pipe cleaner together to form the beads into a circle. It should now be starting to look a bit like a Christmas ornament.
Have an adult trim the extra ends off of the pipe cleaner.
Have an adult cut a piece of ribbon to create the hanging loop.
Tie the piece of ribbon around the circle of beads. These ornaments seem to hang best if the ribbon is coaxed in between two beads.

That’s how to make these toddler pipe cleaner bead ornaments! This craft is based on this Scandinavian-style DIY ornament tutorial.

Other ideas

I love the simple and natural look of these wood bead ornaments. But, if you wanted to create something else, here are some ideas to try!

Candy cane bead ornaments

You could try making little candy cane ornaments by bending the pipe cleaner into a candy cane shape rather than a circle. Just make sure to secure the first bead!

Or, you could experiment with other fun shapes. You could make beaded pipe cleaner snowflakes, stars, or snowmen!

Use transparent beads

Using transparent beads and colored pipe cleaners could be a fun switch-up. I’m imagining silver pipe cleaners or even sparkly ones!

I’m sure there are lots of other fun ways to make this craft your own, but those are the first two things that came to mind. Have you recreated this craft? Or made something similar? We would love to see it!

Choose multi-color beads if the plain wooden beads are not your style! My daughter found this pack of colored beads at Dollar Tree. They are super fun for pipe cleaner bead ornaments, and can be used other times of year too!