Awesome craft project 00

So with the holidays everything got crazy busy, but I wanted to post a picture of the present I made for a friend this holiday season. I made 6 pokeballs out of pearler beads and put cork on the back to make them into coasters. I found 8-bit pokeball guides online, and dug through a crazy amount of beads to find all the colors i needed. The end result was totally worth it though!

For those who have never worked with pearler  beads before the process is very simple and you can make a lot of neat projects!

Great ball, pokeball, heavy ball, master ball, nest ball, & friend ball.

You need the plastic pegboard that is sold in craft stores with the pearler beads. I find the best way to do it, is to figure out what your making (either rough plan in your head, a sketch, or pictures online) and start pulling out the specific colors you'll need. Once you have enough of each, I used a pair of tweezers to pick up and place the little beads onto the pegboard.

Once you have your design set, put a piece of parchment paper over the beads and take a preheated iron(set to a lower setting, so you don't melt the beads too much) and set it on the parchment paper and glide it around over the design. Once you start to see the circles of the beads get darker (as if they're sweating) check to see how well everything is melted. If some beads aren't melted together as much as others, put more heat on that area. All the beads must be slightly melted to each other otherwise it all falls apart ( Kind of like making a grilled cheese or a quesadilla, if the cheese isn't melted to  both sides or one another it'll fall apart when you try to eat it)

Once all the beads have slightly melted to one another you can let it cool and take it off the pegboard. This is a great project if you have friends that like 8-bit style! You can make all sorts of projects like video game character magnets to coasters!

Enjoy!
-CulinaryMage