Fun Little Project With A Lot Of Possibilities

I was wasting my morning browsing Pinterest researching creative projects when I came across a post about melted bead art. Have you already heard of this? This is new to me and since I have been thinking about getting rid of stuff in my crap room Art Studio, it was perfect. Way back in the day when my kids were really into making geckos from pony beads and lanyard ( does anyone else remember that craze?) we built quite a collection of the little buggers.

I have been hanging on to them for God only knows why.Uuntil today, now I know why too. First you find a metal bowl and you pour a cup of coffee. I live in the Northwest and we don't do anything without coffee.

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 Then you start picking out colors that you like. I recently got a peacock tattoo so I picked peacock colored beads. You can see my pattern started off really even but quickly got a bit wonky. This does not matter to the end result. (see previous post about embracing imperfection)

By the time I got to the top rim of the bowl I started to question my decision on that 5th cup of coffee. You have to have a steady hand and I found that when I did drop or misplace a bead a wooden skewer was perfect for moving them. In fact I got so nervous about carrying the thing without messing it up that I forgot to take a picture until it was inside the oven.You can see that by the time I got to the top it was pretty wonky.

I baked it on 400 degrees for 20 minutes and then another 15 minutes because it wasn't melty enough for me. So 35 minutes total. I also kept my stove vent on high to help with the fumes that come off of melting plastic. There are a lot of fumes and I wouldn't do it unless you have a good vent.

This is what it looked like when I took it out of the oven. I was so excited I forgot to take a close up before I cooled it.

 I used a metal bowl just because I knew that I would not be patient enough to wait for it to cool on it's own. I read that you can use glass but if you did then you would not be able to dunk it in cold water to cool it off. As soon as it cooled it came right out of the bowl and looked like this:

I can't wait to play with this idea some more. If you left a hole in the center it would make a really neat lamp shade. I saw some online somewhere and they were pretty. The edges are kind of sharp and I think when I do another I will leave it in a bit longer to see if the bottom will flatten out a bit.