Homemade Bird Feeders

 

My friend posted about some bird feeders she made here. She got the idea from this blog http://eighteen25.blogspot.com/2011/08/bird-feeders.html, which also has a bunch of other cool ideas if you'd like to browse her posts.  I thought the kids would really enjoy making these since they love animals and nature (still have not figured out where they get that from). Since the kids were off on Monday, we went ahead and tried it out.

Supplies:
3/4 cup birdseed
1/4 cup water
1 small envelope of knox gelatine
twine or string (I used ribbon on my larger ones since I didn't have any twine on hand)
cookie cutters, molds or mason jar lids
wax paper


Bring gelatine and water to a simmer and then stir in the bird seed. Quick heads up, the gelatin and water mixture does not smell that great, IMO.

The kids picked out their cookie cutters and I gave them each a spoon to fill them in with the mixture.

 Then we let them dry over night. I doubled the recipe to get enough mixture for these.

SN: Most of these turned out great, but the ones with smaller areas, not so much (the cat's tail, the swan's head, etc)

I also made another double recipe batch to make a few larger ones. 

Yesterday, the kids came home from school and wanted to hang up their little feeders! It was suppose to rain, so I wanted to wait but they were too excited to expect them to wait any longer.

They hung their cookie cutter ones on our stick tree out front.

And the larger ones on a metal hanger.

 Of course it poured last night, but most of them survived. There were only a few that fell and the birds will still enjoy them. Thanks for posting Jenny, the kids loved them!