Happy Saturday folks! I found a really cool website all about paper beadmaking this week and on it there was a paper bead designer page where you could pick the size and type of bead you want to make and print out the sheet of bead strips for free! Here is what I made with the rainbow texture:
Neat huh? It took a little getting used to. At first it would only print two strips then I changed the settings to make a bead 1 1/8″ wide and for bead type I chose “all over design” and I got nice rectangle bands of color. I cut the strips corner to corner to make a taper. Normally if you roll a strip like that you get a bell shape but you can get an even taper in the center if you trim the wide end of the paper so each of the side angles are equal or just compensate by centering the taper as you roll. No need to make it complicated! I used mod podge to glaze the beads and it worked very well. I was worried that my printer ink would smear (it is an ink jet) but the mod-podge was thick enough to keep the ink from running. I did notice a purple/gray tint to my brush once in a while so I wiped it on a paper towel and kept on podgein’!
I use paraffin wax coated toothpicks to glaze my beads on, the wax keeps the mod-podge from gluing the bead to the toothpick. I stick the pics in Styrofoam to keep the beads from touching anything as they dry. Last weekend I went on a paper bead binge, look I filled my bottle with beads! I was very proud of myself! 🙂
It was a small bottle but still, there is probably 400 beads in there! Now I have a lot of beads to varnish, that’s OK tho, It is a nice chill-out task I can do in front of the TV, much like making the beads, heck who needs relaxation medication? Let’s all make paper beads! Thanks for stopping by and til next time happy crafting!
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