Craft - Bendable Arms and Legs for Elf on the Shelf

Here’s wishing you a wonderful and memorable Holiday season!  I’ll finish my Blog off with a couple Elf on the Shelf posts.  Honestly, I’m not sure who had more fun with these elves – me or the granddaughters!

I performed a little elf surgery and in an hour, the girl’s elves can now do all kinds of acrobatic stuff as well as bench pressing marshmallows as I’ve seen on Pinterest! They can even grasp things!

Get your wire cutters and cut four pieces about 6.5” long of any kind of medium weight wire.  Set these aside.

Elf has stitching at his knee and elbow joints.  Remove the stitching.  This takes the longest to do.  Remove the stitch from his hand as well.

Snip a teeny tiny hole in the back of his foot about an inch from the bottom.

Straighten out a length of wire and curl one end.

Shove it into the elf limb.  You might have to wiggle it a little bit.

Get the wire in there as far as it will go.  Snip off the excess wire, leaving just a little bit sticking out.  Curl this end now.

Wiggle the last bit in by pulling the foot over it, so that it doesn’t come back out of the hole later.

Repeat for all limbs.  I squirted a bit of Fabri-Tac glue in the holes to close them but you could stitch them closed.  The rule is that the kids can’t touch the elf otherwise he loses his magic, so no biggie whether anything is done to the holes!

For his arms, I snipped in his hand – on the top front of one hand and the bottom of the other hand.  Inserted the wire as leg instructions then I used Fabri-Tac glue to apply Velcro that covered my holes.

You now have a bendy elf.  Go and pose him doing something fabulous!  You would think what you pay for an elf, they would have done this for you!