Tuesday 15 March 2016

Paper beads

After starting to clear the house of a lot of unwanted stuff, including books that not even a charity shop will take, I decided to read up further on paper beads.

I started cutting up the book with the most colourful pictures and started rolling. Apparently I did not do my research well enough and it took me a while and some further research and looking at videos, to find out that you do NOT have to start with one piece of paper and try to connect the next one onto it to get the bead to the thickness you want. You can start with as many pieces of paper as you want! It also took a few tries  to find out which size of beads I wanted but I think I got the hang of it now.

I love the discs but have up to now only done one and this one turned out pretty well. I did not like the colours of the beads I made from the colourful picture pages. They were all too dark, so I painted them pink(ish). For the mint and pale blue beads I used coloured paper that I bought years ago and use to make my bag patterns with by sticking them together.

I started varnishing them with clear nail polish but that did not turn out very satisfactory. It took too long and the brush was just to short.

After raiding the cellar, when Alan was working in the garden, I found some parquet floor high gloss varnish and the stuff to clean your brushes with and varnished the stock I made.

And this is just a small collection of what I made in the past few days, waiting to dry and to be made into necklaces:



No comments: