Mini Perlers!!!

I previously posted here, here, and here about playing with my perler beads to make all kinds of things including cartoon characters, cute little animals, magnets, and ornaments.

Sure,...those were fun and dandy and all..but only so much a challenge, right? At the time, EK Success Brands - Perler had those and these guys here, and those didn't really catch my fancy. I mean, they were marketing those bead 'n' rods mixes for making things like butterflies, and you all *know* I love me some butterflies, buuuuuut...**shrug** meh, they didn't seem too exciting for me to play with.

And then there were MINI PERLERS!!!

Yes, just perlers, but they're sooooooooo tiny!!! "Now THERE'S a challenge!" I says to myself.

I was going to Michael's craft store for something else when I happened to walk by an end cap with Mini Perler Beads!! This is my first stash:

How exciting are these, right?!?

To give you a good idea of how big they are on their own, here's some white beads standing up and on their sides, regular perlers on top, minis on bottom, next to the millimeters side of my ruler:

And then the regular perler beads on their own...

Here's perhaps a better picture showing their relative sizes...

The regular perlers are about 5mm x 5mm and the mini perlers are about 2mm x 3mm. How crazy is that?! 

Now, the first thing I wanted to make was...you guessed it! A butterfly!!

EEE!!! Can you just see how tiny it is?! No? Well, the next things I made were actually re-makes of pieces I made before so that I could compare, and show you all the difference in the sizes:

This is the Pac-Man tic-tac-toe set I made a while back, showing the size comparisons between regular, and the mini perler beads. Does that help give you a better idea on the difference in sizes? I wish someone had done this when I was originally looking into getting them, it probably would have made me even more excited!!

Something I learned really quickly however is that with the minis being so much smaller, ironing them is a much more delicate job than the regulars. As you can see below, all those holes are where I had "blowout"; the air captured between the bottom and the iron, when it gets too hot while melting, just "blows out" and escapes, creating that nasty, ugly, hole! :(

I even tried ironing the backside of some of the pieces, but got the same result (the top light blue ghost piece I believe is where this happened and you can tell both sides are ironed).

The other problem was just plain having the iron temperature too darn hot, see below:

You can see where it over-melted a little particularly on the top and bottom of the butterfly's body. The bottom especially is just so distorted, I think I even had to clip a little off with nail clippers because it just looked like it had a tail or something!!

Anywho, the last piece I made I found as a cross stitch pattern online I think, and decided it'd be cute as heck as a mini perler piece, sooo....

And monster back-side:

Not too bad, I think, on the ironing! Now I just have to work on getting all the beads evenly ironed, WITHOUT getting blowout again, and I'm golden!!

Either way, I had fun with these guys, I think they're definitely worth playing around with if for nothing else but to make the same types of pieces you would with regular size perlers, smaller, and save space wherever you want to display them since they are so much smaller. 

For me however, there's this weird sense of novelty when I can make miniature anything...up to and including the want to have a dollhouse or play around with making miniature furniture and things that would go in a dollhouse...lol

I will say this one thing for sure though.....BUY THE TWEEZERS!!! The tweezers that you can get with this line of products is a life-saver and I would not have been able to place the beads in the trays otherwise!!

I hope you guys have a better idea now of the awesomeness of these little guys, and are perhaps excited to play with them yourself! I highly recommend making sure to keep the containers well stored/closed, or even put the beads into little ziplocs if you want to organize them that way, like these guys here (these are what I use to keep my jewelry beads organized, in drawers) as I can't imagine spilling a container of these in your carpet and having to pick them up... Honestly, if I did spill them on the floor, I'd be hard pressed not to just vacuum them up and call them a loss! That is, after I've had my screaming, or maybe even just laughing, maniacally at what just happened...hahaha

Until next time, craft ya laters!!

**Side-note...this was not a sponsored post, I just wanted to share my purchase and what I learned, especially on the differences on the two sizes of beads as I had trouble finding the kind of info I shared with you all here today!!**

UPDATE!!!

I bought the other set they had....I just had to!!

Mario characters using skin tones especially, here I come!!! Wheeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!

Perler Bead Tic-Tac-Toe Sets

I almost completely forgot to show you guys some of the perler bead sets I made a few months ago and just never got a chance to blog about!!

The idea of perler games came to mind, and when I saw this one online, I just couldn't resist making one myself!!

Mario mushroom tic-tac-toe set made from perler beads.

Then the idea came up so I went online to get ideas of what looked best for small versions of Mr and Mrs Pac-Man along with the ghosts and this is what came next:

Mr and Mrs Pac-Man tic-tac-toe set made from perler beads.

The bff, Airon, is really enjoying crossfit and has found it as a passion and so when we were talking about the previous sets, of course it was logical that we'd come up with something like this!

Crossfit tic-tac-toe set made from perler beads with kettle bells as pieces and barbells as the grid.

What do you guys think?! I'm thinking maybe putting magnets on the backs of the boards and then the pieces so they could be put up on a wall, or for anyone that has a travel tin, the pieces could be kept in there and then the metal of the tin used as the magnet backing for car travel games and such!

Craft ya laters!!

Perler Beads - Post 1

I titled this one "Post 1" because since around Halloween 2012, I have been let's say.... mildly addicted with making perler sprites and as I continue to keep making more, this is pretty much only a portion of what I'll eventually get around to doing! This is mostly going to be a picture slideshow, but these are most of the ones I've made since I picked some up in October last year and have added on since. There are a few more I haven't gotten to get good pictures (and even some of these aren't the best, I'm sorry!) but those will be in another post later:

Megaman 1

Sorry for the photoshop, I took 2 pictures for these, one that included the coin, the other included the pipe.  But here we have Mario, a pipe, fire flower, coin and I guess coin box?

Mario flower

These are some pieces I did for my boss at work. We have 2 of the guys from Despicable Me (movie), an owl and  Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street.

Mario's Hammer Bro

Sonic the Hedgehog 

Megaman 2

Earthworm Jim

Megaman 3 and Elec Man

Megaman 4.... a LOT of people like and asked for a Megaman!! lol

Cape Mario

Yoshi

Black Mage

Deadpool

Turbo (Wreck It Ralph)

Mario Spring

These are on the wall at my desk at work!! We have Birthday Bear, Bedtime Bear and Cheer Bear!

Donkey Kong Country Bananas

A quick note, I was working on the above bananas (from Donkey Kong Country videogame) and the metal tweezers I was using slipped out of my hand and fell......

I was able to fix it though (obviously) but below is how far I WAS before I dropped the tweezers.... My boyfriend kind of looked at me funny when he heard me whimpering until he saw what happened haha. Note to self, be wayyy more careful while holding tweezers and I REALLY hope I don't do that when I get to some of the bigger projects I have planned!!

I still have quite a few requests I need to get working on, but a lot of what I want to make requires colors I don't have, and neither does Joanns (local supply store that sells the beads by the color, no other local store does). I do believe that Airon, myself and another friend (whom we have awesomely gotten into doing perler beads) are going in on a bulk order from the manufacturer's website. 

I'll try to get pictures of the other pieces I've made that aren't in this post and show you guys what else I've got done, including a picture of our fridge at home as boyfriend painted it orange so it's a cool background, but there's also multiple scenes of magnets going on (see Mario and pipe and flower and coin ;) ).

If any of you are interested, you can check out/follow my Pinterest board: Perler Beads!

Craft ya laters!!

Monthly All Girls Craft Group - May 2013

Again, a little late on this since we had May's craft day on 5/18/13, but here we go!! (I will try to get better and more prompt about posting these, I swear!)

First, we had Anne working on a necklace and earring set for her mother:

Isn't it pretty?! 

Chessire spent some more time getting her scrapbooking done... I envy her, I have 2 drawers full of stuff I need to get in my scrapbook for HIGH SCHOOL that I STILL haven't gotten to!! One of these days.... Hopefully I can get that done before getting married and having kids to scrapbook for. 

Next up, Michelle was working a little on her silver polymer clay flowers for an upcoming wedding. These guys keep getting better and better!! 

Airon brought out the perler beads once again and had some fun... Guys, this is only 1 of the 2 boxes we've acquired of these things, and the 2nd box is more overflowing than this one! Also, we have about a dozen pegboards to use too!! They're still not enough! lol

Here she is working on some hearts...or is she?

Iron, iron, and iron some more!

Final design to be shown below...

Anne got in on some of the perler bead action and made these guys for her daughter!

This guy got ironed just enough to give him some pretty funk-a-licious hair, don'tcha think!?

After my first attempt of making a felted bunny here, I decided to make another one except I did it more like the original tutorial and did a more 3-D head. I left the ears for this craft day but after making 1, I decided to see what it would look like on my fella:

 You guys, I was *this* close to leaving him like this! But I was talking into making another ear....

As you can see, I was also talked into making a little cut-out in his new ear as if he's had some "special" times.

 My next project was to follow this tutorial and decided to try my hand at a felted rattle ball:

 This thing is actually pretty awesome... It's soft, it has a small rattle in there and is just pretty neat to begin with. We didn't have any bells or plastic eggs, but Anne was kind enough to supply me with a plastic ball from a toy she'd gotten her daughter and I put some beads in there. I then wrapped a ball around that with some yarn she also was kind enough to bum me (double-sided tape was the best we had or could find in getting the darn yarn to stick to the plastic ball but it worked fantastically!). Then I just used some yellow, blue and purple felt to make the outside! Took me about 10-15 minutes I believe to make this and so wasn't really that hard at all! I might just make some more!

 Then I decided to make a free-form piece that I could maybe turn into a wrist cuff or just an embellishment for a purse or something for later...

Final result at the bottom of this post...

 Anne saw this felting thing and decided to get in on the fun there too!! 

She made the CA-YOOTEST bunny!!!

Then Mr Bunny wanted to sit on Airon's heart-petal flower!!!

Here are all the final pieces (with the exception of my first 2-D bunny in there too) that got made this craft day!!

How's about that for a craft day spread!! We didn't get in progress pics but the butterflies were also made by Airon for her nieces and the felted ball bead (above the fish) was made by Michelle when she decided to test out the felting craft too! Bottom right is the final product of my possible future wrist cuff. I played around with using random pieces of felt as well as getting longer, bigger pieces and doing things like the twisted swirl on the left in blue, the folded over twist in purple at the middle top and the thinner loop of yellow on the far right.


I am sooo excited for where these craft days are going!! They have mostly been small, but hey, that means we can play around a little more with each others crafts and we still have lots of fun! I can't wait for next month!!

Craft ya laters!!