But back to Minecraft! This book has 15 easy to make projects, three of which are bead based. Picture beads (also known under the brand names Hama or Perler) are fusible polyethylene (i.e. non toxic) plastic beads. You arrange your design on plastic pegboards, cover them with baking paper and then fuse them together with an iron. They can of course also be strung into necklaces, woven into keychains, or even assembled into 3D objects. I hadn’t really known anything about Perler/Hama/Picture beads before seeing them in this book but I can now see why making projects with them is so popular. Taking the time to carefully lay out your design pixel by pixel or bead by bead is very meditative and relaxing. Just don’t trip on the way to the ironing board!
Below are some of the projects I made with my 7 year old daughter. The beads and boards we used are the PYSSLA range from IKEA and we found the IKEA tabletop ironing board was perfect as was my Prym mini iron*. We started with my full size iron but managed to melt a number of our boards, oops!
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