Fusible Beads and a Kids’ Crafternoon Give Away.
Have you ever tried crafting with fusible beads?
I’d seen packets of Hama beads in our local toy shop, but I never really knew what they were until Hardie Grant sent my kids and I copies of the two new Kid’s Crafternoon Books. The Beading book features little birdy earrings made from fusible beads on the front cover and that inspired us to pick up some beads and bead boards and have a play.
The fusible beads are really tiny, and quite tricky to keep under control, so we started out just playing with patterns and colours to make basic shapes while we got the hang on them.
Once you’ve arranged your beads in the pattern you want on the board, you place baking paper over them and ‘fuse’ them with a hot iron for a few seconds. It took me a while to figure out the optimum amount of iron time and how much melt you needed to get the items to really stay stuck together, but even the ones I over melted still looked pretty cool
We had a go at one of the birds in the Beading book. The girls followed the pattern easily and were thrilled with the results. The bird inspired them to come up with their own more complex patterns and we ended up making the first letter in each of their names, a beaver (?!) and lots of other letters, shapes and patterns.
The girls LOVED this activity. It’s spot on for a 7-8 year old who like to sit and create, playing with patterns and colours. They sat and created for nearly two hours!
Morgan found it just a little tricky to get the beads to go where he wanted them, and getting them stay there (so did I!). He gave up after a while, preferring to offer colour selection advice to the rest of us.
I really enjoyed this activity too and my mind is whirring with cool things you could do with these beads! The Kids’ Crafternoon Beading book offers inspiration for using the fusible beads to make earrings, magnets and even bunting! I think they’d make cool bracelets if you made small circles and strung them together and we are thinking of turning our letters in to broaches. You can also string these as regular beads, so they are quite versatile, and lots of fun.
I blogged about the first two Kids’ Crafternoon books, Papercraft and Sewing, back in July. Now there are two new books to add to the series – Kids’ Crafternoon Beading and Kids’ Crafternoon Felting. Edited by Kathreen from Whipup, the two new books are just as lovely as the first two. Full of interesting projects from a variety of contributors, and perfect for kids aged 6 and up, and adults too of course!
All four books are available from Booktopia.
{ Disclosure: I was given a copy of each book to review. I was not compensated in any other way for this post. The opinions in this post are purely my own. }
We would like to make thomas , james , percy and island of sodor with fusible beads.
we would love to win kids’ craftemoon beading.
We also got that tub of fusible beads and we have used it extensively. For a birthday party of 4 year olds (about 20) I had them all sitting on the floor stringing the beads together with paper flowers onto pipe cleaners for a wristband – it was the only 30min of the whole party where you hardly heard a sound – real bliss!
I would love the Crafternoon Beading book.