Fun With Perler Beads
Summer’s here and while the kiddos are excited to have time off from school, the “I’m bored” whine was nearly immediate. I love my kids and love spending time with them, but ‘creative’ and ‘fun’ are not really the best descriptors for me. I know Pinterest is full of ideas, but that stuff is HARD (and some of it is messy, which quite frankly is not my thing).
So when you’re having a deer-in-headlights parenting moment and you need to entertain kids in a calm, orderly and mess-free way, what do you do? Perler Beads!
That’s right, Perler Beads: those little tiny beads you can get at IKEA, Target and craft stores. The littlest one got a set of these for her birthday. So on our first Monday off from school, we opened it up and started playing.
The craft is easy: Pick out a base, put the beads on the little pegs in the design that you want,cover, iron, cool, flip over, cover, iron again, done.
Some tips that I learned:
Put your beads in a bowl to keep them from ending up all over the place. Multiple kids = multiple bowls.
Build them in a place where there is not a lot of movement. If you have a table that easily moves when it’s bumped, build them someplace else. These beads very easily come off.
We had two sets: one with blunt tweezers and one with pointed tip tweezers. I found the pointed tip tweezers to be the ONLY way I could get any beads into place. My kiddos were frustrated with the tweezers, but did great with their fingers.
The instructions say to heat the iron up to medium. The instructions are a lie. You need that iron hot enough to grill a sandwich. I turned mine up all the way.
Place the beads in the pattern you want.
Cover with the ironing paper before applying heat.
Ta-da!
The best part of the project: hanging out with this guy!
