A while back I bought a BIG jar of fusible beads from Ikea.
We used them in the traditional way with inspiration from the Kid’s Crafternoon Beading book, and then they sat on the shelf, untouched, for months.
Then I stumbled across this gorgeous Danish blog, wooz.dk, I hit translate and decided we had to try making fusible bead Christmas decorations for ourselves!
What You’ll Need…
Fusible beads – Hama or Pearler beads or the ones you can buy at Ikea are fine.
Metal cookie cutters
Baking tray
Baking paper
Oil
What to Do…
Cover your baking tray with non-stick baking paper and place the cookie cutters on the tray.
I used cooking oil spray to coat the insides of my cookie cutters, but you could just use regular oil wiped on with a paper towel. Whichever method you use, just make sure you coat them really well with oil other wise the melted beads will stick to the side of the cutters.
Pre-heat your oven to around 220 degrees Celsius.
Then the fun part… spoon the fusible beads carefully into the cookie cutters.
The shapes come out the best when you put only a single layer of beads inside the cookie cutters, and make sure they are reasonably neatly arranged to fill all the nooks and crannies. But one layer is a little fiddly for small hands and not as much fun as just spooning them in, so don’t worry if you get more beads in your cutter, they will still come out ok.
Be warned, you are going to get little beads everywhere! That’s ok, just pick up any stray beads off the tray and either pop them in your cookie cutters or back in the bead container so they don’t melt all over the tray.
Carefully pop your tray full of bead cookies into the hot oven, and watch what happens…
The beads will begin to melt and slump down in the cookie cutters as they fuse together.
If you put a single layer of beads in your cookie then it will only take a few minutes for them to melt and fuse together. If you put in loads of beads it will take a while longer.
Once your bead cookies are melted to your satisfaction, carefully take out the tray and using tongs or an oven glove pop your bead cookies into a bowl of warm water. This will cool them off slowly and make it easy to pop them out of the cookie cutters.
And a word to the wise… it may seem like a good idea to make a Christmas tree in the ‘correct’ colours, but you will spend hours trying to get those darn little beads to go in the right blo0dy spots and you’ll still end up with a rouge bead in there somewhere!
![[Facebook]](http://picklebums.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/facebook.png)
![[Twitter]](http://picklebums.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/twitter.png)
![[Email]](http://picklebums.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/email.png)
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
These look great! We’ve made bowls with our beads from Ikea before, but didn’t think of tree decorations.
What temp did you bake these at? We are definitely trying this! Thank you for the inspiration!!
I had this exact activity on our to-do-list once the school holidays start. Thank you, for the very detailed instructions, it will make it a lot easier than trialling it myself!