What fun we had watching seeds grow as hair from our chia pet’s head! Creating your own chia pet (or head) is super easy and a great activity for everyone to see nature in action!
What You Need:
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Soil
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Sawdust (optional. It is just a filler)
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Nylon – (Can get knee highs for pretty cheap at the store)
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Chia seed, wheat grass seed, regular grass seed, or any other herb seed
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String or rubber bands
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A little bowl for your creation to sit in
Directions:
Cut nylon to size you would like your chia pet to be (you can always make it smaller later). Get nylon wet. Add seeds to toe area or where you would like “hair” to grow. Add plenty of seed so you have a lot of hair! Keep the directions for the seeds so you can refer to them later. Add 2 handfuls of dirt on top of seeded area. If you don’t have enough dirt, you can add sawdust to fill the rest of the nylon until you get desired size. Allow room for give so you can “design” your pet.
Now you can create your pet into something other than a potato! You can make a head, caterpillar, or anything you want. My son thought it would be fun to do a head! You can use rubber bands or string to tie off different areas. All I had was string from when I used to do cross-stitching and it worked great!
Tie off the area you would like and then shaping afterwards is easy (like, if you wanted a more pointy nose instead of a round nose).
Our “Man” with ears and a nose
Then decorate. My son said he needed eyes and eyebrows.
After “Man” has been shaped a bit more and given some more features.
Place your creation in the little bowl in an area where everyone can watch its hair grow. Our seed directions said to keep the dirt wet until seedlings appeared, which took about 5 days. We made him on a Monday afternoon and by Saturday night you could see a few tiny sprouts that were able to get through the nylon. By Sunday morning he had a full head of hair and by Monday morning ( a week after he was created) he had an inch of hair!
If I could have…I would have bought the Chia seed and invited a ton of mom/kids over and made these. We could not find any wheat grass seeds or chia seeds in small packets (we looked everywhere!). We finally found some chia seeds at the health food store, but they were $14 for a pretty big bottle and I didn’t want to spend that much or have that much seed leftover. So, we ended up using regular grass seed that we used for our backyard. It worked nice, but it would be fun to have something growing we could use.
P.S.
Keep a good eye on him. After a good morning of cleaning and play, I noticed “Man” was missing! The kids claimed they did not know where he was. I finally found him under the trampoline and now my son admits (2 days later) that he moved him because, ” ‘Man’ wanted to hide from the sun!”
