Hand-Dyed Wooden Beads and Blocks in Pumpkin+Bear

"Aww, look!" I thought. "The chicken wants to seee what I'm doing out on the deck on this gorgeous afternoon!"

"Isn't she pretty?"

"HEY!!! Those are not berries!"

So there you go. My hand-dyed wooden beands and blocks are so pretty that chickens think they're berries.

I can't even tell you when I dyed these--a couple of years ago, perhaps?

We were doing several projects that involved hand-stained wood, and I was working out just the perfect technique to share over at Crafting a Green World.

While working out the technique to my satisfaction, I made waaaaaay more dyed wood pieces than we needed for the projects.

Apparently, I just squirreled the surplus away in my stash, because I am actually a hoarder.

I rediscovered them the other day while I was cleaning and decided I might as well peep into that plastic drawer in the closet--I'm still finding containers that I haven't unpacked after our move (which was four years ago now, for those of you playing the home game), so perhaps that drawer could contain my wedding ring, or my folk music anthology!

It didn't.

What it did have, however, were projects that I'd meant to list/relist in my Pumpkin+Bear shop. Some were projects that I used to have listed but wanted to rephotograph or rework in some way, and some where projects that I wanted to list in Pumpkin+Bear, but I'm guessing the light was poor on the day that I wanted to photograph them, or I got busy, and set them aside, consequently forgetting all about them.

Of course.

Fortunately, last week we had our first sunny, above freezing days in FOREVER, and there was nothing I wanted to do more than spend the afternoon out on the deck photographing stuff.

These cubes are 1/2" across, nice and light and brightly-colored now.

These beads are 3/4" diameter, with a 3/8" hole.

The kids actually use our stash of undyed wooden cubes as a sensory material. I pour them out onto a tray that sits on our homeschool table, and off and on all week I'll notice a kid fiddling with them as she thinks or reads. They're stackable, arrangeable, and they just feel good in your hands.

Syd really wants to turn some of these beads into Camp Halfblood beads, so that's a project we'll be taking on before too long.

I've used these stained beads to make magnetic mosaic tiles for our giant metal memo board. I'll probably use some of these to make more, and I'm tempted to upcycle a metal tin from somewhere and make a travel-sized version.

Of course, if you bought these from me, I'm sure I'd find something else to happily hoard and/or occupy my time with...

History of Fashion Study: How to Drill a Hole in a Shell

Syd and I started a History of Fashion study this summer, using this book as our spine:



It's a very leisurely study, with lots of handicrafts, so we've actually spent most of the summer on the first unit, Prehistoric Fashion. We studied how animal skins are prepared, how the first sewing needles were invented, we worked with leather, we learned about the invention of weaving, we did some weaving, we learned about the first types of jewelry, and we crafted with shells.

I'll give you the full run-down of this unit later, because it's been awesome, but first: if you want to craft with shells, you probably at some point need to know how to drill a hole in a shell. I'm here to help you with that!




As you can see in the image above, you only need two things: a drill and a suitable drill bit. You can go old-school prehistoric and use a hand drill, or you can use what I use, which is a Dremel. It's so high-speed that it drills through pretty much anything as if that thing is butter.

If you use a Dremel, you also have a lot of choice in what bit you use. I used an engraving bit because that's what I had on hand and I was too lazy to go to the store, but I regret that a little now, because the bit was a bit too soft and I managed to wear it down in the course of drilling through just a few shells. I'd have done better to put the shells in a very shallow pan of water so that I could drill them wet, but it would have been best if I'd used an actual drill bit, such as a narrow tungsten carbide bit or even a diamond bit.

Ah, well... Next time!

Regardless, didn't these shells come out perfectly?



I'll show you another time how Syd and I painted and glittered them, and all the random stuff that we did with them, but right now Will is taking a practice SAT exam at the table near the computer, and I can't wander off with my camera and photograph shells because I have to supervise her and remind her every ten minutes that she can't actually make snarky comments about the questions out loud during the actual SAT...

Homeschooled kids. I tell you what.

P.S. Now that I'm no longer the editor of Crafting a Green World, I spend all my social media time on this blog's Facebook page. I share interesting links to homeschool resources and craft tutorials, and I take weird photos of my WIPs and our homeschool day and put them there. Come see me!

How NOT to Make Melted Plastic Bead Ornaments (and also How to)

We've got a medium-sized stash of random, mixed-up, unsorted beads, and one day I dream that we shall instead have a stash--of any size--of organized, sorted beads, many of which are the color and shape that we find most useful.

Until then, however, the children and I craft from the madness, picking out by hand what we'd like, and to hasten the end of this chaos and forward the time when order will reign, I encourage the types of projects that use up lots of beads quite quickly.

Such is the case with this project, these melted plastic bead ornaments.

We've done sun catchers before, and although it was a while ago I pretty much remembered how we made them, and so I started the kids working on their ornaments the same way, first sorting out the beads and filling their silicon muffin trays with their selections.

You can also use metal muffin tins, or even non-stick baking pans, but these novelty silicon trays make cute ornaments. 

Ideally, you want to use pony beads, because those have a standard melting temperature (around 400 degrees), but with our mixed assortment, the kids used only mostly pony beads, with others included as they struck their fancy. 

Ideally, you also want to arrange the beads into a single layer, but that's pretty fussy, so the kids simply plopped the beads in however they liked, with me reminding the big kid several times to keep it shallow.

I've heard that you can melt your beads over an outdoor grill, but last time I plugged the toaster oven outside and used that, and it worked so well that I did it again. You can set a toaster oven to the correct temperature, and since it's outside, all those toxic fumes of melting plastic will simply dissipate on the wind.

Yep, toxic fumes. I'm 100% positive that this project is crap for the environment.

So the thing about my toaster oven is that it's really old, and even when we DID buy it, we bought it at a garage sale, so it's, like, really, REALLY old. 

And... it probably doesn't work quite right, particularly in the temperature setting, because when I set it to a perfectly reasonable 425 degrees, going out to check on it every five minutes (it should take around 20-25 minutes for the beads to melt nicely), this is what I found when I pulled the tray out for my second check:

Um.... oops?

There goes my favorite silicone mold!

Obviously, the toaster oven was WAY hotter than 400 degrees, so when I tried again (of course I tried again!), I set it down to 300 degrees.

Perfection:

Use a power drill to drill a hole near the top of the ornament (but not too close to the edge, or the drill's torque will cause the brittle plastic to crack), use a pair of wire nippers to cut off about six inches of jewelry wire, and let the kids use the wire to make hanging loops for their ornaments, and then hang them on the tree for all to admire:

The little kid made the stocking, and the big kid made the burned gingerbread cookie. Goofy kid.

I really want to show the kids how to use roughly the same technique to make these ornaments out of melted crayon, as well, but who knows if I'll have the time? 

Good thing that Christmas will happen next year, too!

P.S. Want to follow along with all of our handmade, homeschooling successes and failures? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Antique Sleds and Vintage Beads

a tutorial for making ornament hangers out of old beaded necklaces

and a tutorial for cleaning and maintaining an old wood and metal sled

The girls do have one plastic sled, as well, and they've learned through experience that the plastic sled is much better for that very first day of snow, when it's all dry and fluffy. Give the snow another day, though, to pack down a little, and the wood and metal sled becomes an unstoppable force of gravity, careening at bullet speed past the kids on their light little sheets of plastic. 

Okay, and one time it definitely careened at bullet speed INTO a kid, and the kid cried and his mom was pissed, and fine, I apologized, but to be fair, every single other kid at the park was sledding *here* and walking back up the hill *there*, and if YOUR kid is going to insist on walking back up the hill here, where everyone is sledding, and not there, where everyone is walking, well...

My kids' sled is heavy and fast.

Perler Bead Play

Sydney is hooked on Perler beads. Seriously, she's got it bad.

I bought the Perler Beads and a small selection of their pegboards several years ago, and Willow and I played with them a bit while Sydney napped (if only she still took two-hour afternoon naps...), but they caught neither of our fancies as more than a novelty, and so they've sat, on the craft shelves, for years.

There they sat, temptingly on a low shelf, ready for a certain six-year-old to discover in her own time.

Since their discovery, the Perler beads have spent their time either on our big living room table or off of it, scattered across the floor, until the kid responsible finishes throwing her fit and picks them up and sets them back on the table. Other than mealtimes and schoolwork, Sydney designs with them almost constantly. She makes things like elaborate hearts and colorful fish, challenging her fine motor skills and exploring patterning and symmetry.

I don't completely have the patience for Perler beads, and every time I finish a design and go to iron it and accidentally bump the design and all the Perler beads fall off and I have to re-do the design, I get pissed. I did join Syd yesterday, however, to make her a tree for her dollhouse:

The renovation of her dollhouse is something that Sydney has wanted to do for YEARS. She wants to give her plain, unfinished wooden dollhouse the works--paint, wallpaper, carpet, etc. I've been shamefully putting her off for just as long, because, frankly, the dollhouse cost too much to end up looking like crap (instead, I let her paint a small dollhouse), but now that my Sydney is six, and has the patience and fine motor skills and design sense to work with Perler beads, I'm thinking that it's finally time for that special project.

Just...after Thanksgiving, you know?

My Latest over at CAGW: DIY Car Air Fresheners and How to Drill Stuff

a tutorial for DIY natural car air fresheners

and some tips for drilling very odd objects using a Dremel

We've been making a lot of fused plastic bead suncatchers lately--the kiddos LOVE them, and I'm secretly trying to use up our huge stash of completely random beads:

and two buttons--oops!

Other than the pasta ones, which we dyed ourselves (and which won't work in these suncatchers, so we had to sort them out), they've all been given to us from here and there and everywhere, completely unsorted, and when they're gone I'll be replacing them on an as-needed basis with a much smaller number of very carefully sorted beads, so that we'll have an easier time getting organized for specific projects.

To make the suncatchers, start out with a set of novelty silicon muffin tins--you'll see in some of the photos that I also use regular metal muffin tins, but since those don't bend they're actually much harder to get the finished suncatcher out of, and I don't recommend using them unless you absolutely need that particular shape.

Fill the bottom of each mold with just enough beads to cover the bottom:

The beads will flatten and spread as they melt, so you want your layer to be pretty thin to maintain the suncatcher's translucency:

I move our garage sale toaster oven outside to the back deck for this project, and I would NOT do it otherwise. Melting plastic is a nasty business, and it will absolutely smoke and give off fumes, and you do not want those fumes in your house. So if you do not have a toaster oven that you can haul outside for this project, then I strongly recommend that you simply not do it. Wait around for garage sale season to come back--our toaster oven cost $4, and we seriously use it multiple times a day.

Set the toaster oven to around 250 degrees, and don't bother letting it preheat. Just set your silicon mold on the tray, put the tray in the toaster oven--

--and come back to check on it every few minutes. You'll first see the beads start to look really soft and slumpy--

--but leave them in until the beads look flat and the surface of the suncatcher is even:

Take the tray out of the oven, transfer the mold from the tray to a safe spot for it to rest, and let it cool:

The finished suncatchers should be quite sturdy, and I really like the way that they look:

To hang them, you simply need to drill a hole, add twine, and string them up! It's long been in the back of my mind to make a really cool Calder-style mobile, but so far we've been hanging them all individually, kind of like ornaments for our trellis and our trees:

I've got a miniature skull silicon mold set, so now I'm considering melting the beads in a thick layer in the skull molds, then drilling a hole through horizontally to make giant skull beads.

Because the world NEEDS giant skull beads, yes?