My girls and I love to craft. Sometimes we "invent" uses for the things we want to craft. This was one of those times.
We decided that our new J12 room at church (see post about string art) needed some decorations for each table. We had already made duct tape pencil holders but really wanted an excuse to make something with melty beads (they are really called Perler beads, but I will forever call them' melty beads'. Just like I call our "handheld mixer" a shuzsher.) I had seen a picture of a small bowl made with melty beads and thought it looked so cool how they melded together and held a nice shape. So off to look for oven safe bowls.
Which I had none.
I had bowls that were the perfect shape but not oven safe.
I had oven safe custard dishes that weren't the right shape.
We tried making a bowl in an aluminum mini pie tin- it was definitely our "practice" bowl (you can see our practice bowl in one of the pictures). It was hard to get out, had the impression, number, and symbol on the bottom, and I thought it looked like an ashtray. It just didn't have the shape I was looking for.
Finally, after keeping my eye out on multiple shopping trips to different stores, I spied the perfect bowls at Target. They were only $1. They only problem was that I knew the beads needed to be heated at 400 degrees and these bowls were only heat safe to 350 degrees but since they were just a buck, I decided to chance it. Now that we had everything (bowl, beads, vegetable oil spray) we were ready!
My 11 year old, Evie, had a friend over so we decided to make them all together since we wanted to use them in their J12 youth room at church.
1. We sprayed the bowls with vegetable oil spray to make the bowls easier to pop out after they were melted.
2. We put in a handful of beads in each bowl and pushed them down to create a single layer of beads that went up the side of the bowl.
3. I turned the oven on at this point to 375 degrees.
4. I put the dishes on a cookie sheet to make it easier to get them out afterwards and put them in the oven while it was preheating so the bowls could heat up along side with the oven.
5. I checked them every 5 minutes because I had changed the temperature from 400 and put them in during preheating. It took about 12-15 minutes after the oven had reached temperature.
Once they were all melty I took the cookie sheet out and let them cool for a bit. Then I popped them out- some edges needed some prying with a butter knife. We were very impressed with our melty bowls. It was easy and fun and actually turned out- which are all bonuses when crafting with tweens!
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