So once again, I have to credit the4yablog.com for an amazing idea. I had seen in another one of their posts about making video game characters out of fuse beads. Exciting and totally rad! Well I was browsing some more and came across another post about making valentines out of those same beads. Great idea since I was probably going to have to order a ton of them anyways.
I ordered my kit from koolstuff4kids.com. I ordered the Classroom Kit II, which seems to be an ok starter kit. It comes with 6,000 mix color beads, several small clear pegboards, along with ironing sheets and an idea book. Be forewarned that the mix bag does have a somewhat limited palette of colors (bright yellow, goldenrod, light sky blue, dark sky blue, white, lime green, kelly green, black, tan, brown, pink, and red). It seems like an impressive list, but if you want to do really cool detail shading, it can be a bit stilting. That wasn't really an isuue for the hearts, but when we do video game characters next month, I can see it being a problem, so I'll have to order more colors.
I printed out some the examples they had on the blog, and let my teens have at it. The advantage of having the clear pegboards is that you can put pictures underneath to help with the design. Unfortunately, I don't think mine were sized correctly, so they had to count pixels or make up their own designs instead. The project will go a lot faster if the colors are presorted, but if they're not, get them to help you with that - or just don't bother - hey, it takes up more time.
They really seemed to like this one. We used the finished product to make magnets or keychains (as seen above). I haven't done this with my teen boys yet, so I may be updating if they don't really like it. However, I've been pretty spot on with my projects (or they're just really nice and humor me).
No comments:
Post a Comment