We have stumbled upon a craft that is both new and has also been around for about 40 years. These little beads can be one of the most time consuming activities that is both a curse and a blessing. It gives the children an activity that literally can eat up half a day so you can go do other important things while they are occupied, such as sleep. It also keeps them off of YouTube because any more than ten minutes of listening to a teenager yelling while playing Minecraft should be considered cruel and unusual punishment.
These little beads are called Perler Beads. If you don’t know what Perler beads are, they are little colorful plastic beads that you can put together on a plastic peg plate and make designs and then iron them so that they melt ever so slightly fusing them together. You can make a pattern or even complicated pictures based on your time, ability, and patience as you usually have to painstakingly sort them out, carefully place them on the board while trying not to knock the other beads or the container of beads onto the floor. We started by making patterns, but after a while the kids figured out that they can make pictures such as Mario and Star Wars characters. Perler makes kits with designs and there are also about a billion designs on the internet of ideas of things to make.
We first got into this bead thing from some
knock-off IKEA beads that came in a jug that we found at Goodwill. They were terrible and ended up right back from whence they came once we started getting the Perler brand. The other brands don’t melt as well and the holes are bigger, causing you to iron them longer so that they will melt. We have since bought several Perler kits and even bought several separated color packs and placed them in clear tubes so we don’t have to do as much sorting Instead of just getting a big bucket of random colors mixed together.
The kids make their creations on the dinner table so there are always beads all over the table and on the floor. The beads are small and bounce all over the wooden floor once they leave the tabletop. Stepping on these beads can be more painful than stepping on Legos and they are harder to see them once they are on the floor or worse, embedded in the carpet. Once they hit the floor, no matter how much I’ve spent on these precious little plastic beads, they are considered trash. I don‘t have time to pick them all up individually and put them back in their baggies or tubes or whatever they just go straight into the trash can.
The kids have been able to look up different designs off of the internet and even make some elaborate creations out of their imaginations. Most of their designs revolve around Mario right now and I never realized there were so many characters from in Mario, though I think the many versions of some character named Kevin was made up. With all of these completed projects we are running out of room for them all. Right now, they reside in baskets, on shelves, in the kitchen, under the couch, and one inside the dog’s stomach (bad dog). We need to either sell them at some sort of kids craft fair or find friends to give them them to or possibly hide them around town.
At our home there are always multiple projects that need to be ironed. Sometimes they are left on the counter in the evening and we promise to iron them when they go to sleep (the time when all good intentions of work die) and in the morning the kids just walk up to their unfinished projects and wonder why we haven’t ironed all 300 works of art that we promised to do. We promise to iron them when they are at school only for them to wonder why they still aren’t ironed after they have been at school for the past 20 hours.
The kids have a friend that they have encouraged to get on the Perler bead train. Their parents had to actually go out and buy an iron so they could iron the beads. I guess not everyone owns an iron to iron clothes. I mean, I got mine from someone else that left it at my house, but still, I’m an adult and I own an iron. That same friend brought over a new kind of Perler bead, Mini Perler beads. As if having a million beads all over the floor wasn’t bad enough when they spill, these things are imperceptible until you step on them and they enter your bloodstream. I’m not getting started with those.
Perler beads are a great investment for the family. Some familiy buys games or get involved in sports or coding clubs or whatever, but these beads provide hours of entertainment for the kids, allowing you to go and do important things such as catch up with your favorite Instagram stars. They also foster creativity unlike other activities that tends to numb the mind. Though I’m not a fan of the countless beads on the floor and the thousands of projects laying around the house, I’d much rather have these beads than the dolls that Juliana was playing with before that I affectionally called dumpster children.
Link to Perler beads: https://amzn.to/3PVNBfl
*this is an affiliate link- however this post is not sponsored