First Perler Bead Design And Tips

I started making Perler beads back in 2011 when my best friend Cam told me about something I may enjoy because I am a fan of ironing. Yeah. It's that thing people tell me they don't do with their clothes as if it is not obvious to me. I had never heard of Perler beads and to the best of my knowledge had never seen one before. Little did I know that seven years later Id be making designs I found online that seemed impossible and having hundreds of designs stolen by others and sold on Etsy and other sites. The design above is the first thing I ever made and took two hours to do because I kept knocking beads over and ironing too hard in parts.

When I first started I would just copy a simple design online. This whole new world of Perler's opened up to me. It took a long time to make things and over time as I posted my images I made up my own set of rules. 1) Give credit when using someone's designs by posting links to their sites. 2) Take clear pictures so that people could create my designs if they wanted to. 3) Try to make things that no one else had made yet. This last one is the most fun because then I can see people steal designs and talk about how hard it was to create.

I do not have a place to sale my designs because I just give them away to people. If I know what you like I'll just make you something. For years people have said that I should sale my stuff online and eventually I will but for now I am content with just making people slightly more happy by giving them something I made with my own hands. I have done a few pieces and tend to ask for the price of the beads. When I made some Darth Vader designs for someone I realized that making the same thing again sucks and made me miserable. Doing the same thing three times made me never want to make a Vader design or any kind ever again. People will see the stuff I make and say “I don't have the patience to make something like that” and I think “Not with that attitude.” For me it is about making something that is nice to look at or hard to do. I barely make small designs anymore. Things that used to take me three hours to do now take maybe an hour and less if I have the beads separated already.

Here are a few tips to anyone that wants to get started making Perler beads that I wish I knew myself when I got started.

Buy Your Beads From One Brand. If you buy Perler stick with Perler. That is a company. There are many others but I've made the mistake of mixing them and ended up ruining work. Some places make beads that melt flat or at faster temperatures than others and it ends up looking like shit. I also buy my beads from Joann's because they almost always have deals or from Amazon.

You Can Never Have Enough Black/White/Cheddar Beads. These are the colors I run out of the most. If you do not see me posting designs for long periods of time this is why. That and I have lots of others hobbies other than beads. I also make weird music (Click here for SpacebarDJ.blogspot.com to hear that) and thirteen other blogs. I know cheddar sounds like a weird color to need but it is a shade of yellow that highlights designs with yellow that make them look so much better.

Expect To Rage. There have been designs that no one will ever see because I dropped my remote on my peg board or my tweezers. Yeah. You will need tweezers. There are a hundred ways to ruin a design and you will encounter some of them. It happens. If you can save a design you should but if its just wrecked you can sigh heavily and start something else.

Start Small. What I mean by small is doing a small design and as few bits as possible. Video game designs are the most popular so start with video games like Mario Bros. After that you can move on to 16 bit systems like Sega Genesis. Once you get past that next thing you know you are doing arcade designs which run 32 bits and higher. The bits just mean more detail, larger sizes, and more colors. The rust color will become your friend. When you are at the Nintendo stage things beyond that will seem impossible but this is a hobby where the more you do the better you get actually applies. Oh. I'll just add having good lighting. I've made so many things that had the wrong color which I didn't see until the next morning. It is funny to see people use my designs and copy my mistakes.

Find Ideas Everywhere. Like I said, when I started I just copied other folks designs. Then I started going straight to the source using video game sprites. Sites like Sprite DataBase is a really good site to get ideas from. I've also taken animated gifs and froze them for images. If I feel like making my life difficult I'll use PixelStitch. On there you can take images and turns them into pixels to make your own stuff. This is next level advanced shit that you should not try to start off with. It's how I made the Scud design.

I hope some of this nonsense helps you. When people comment I will answer any questions and point you in the right direction.