Melted Bead Ornaments with Hobby Craft

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It's just over a month now until Christmas and in our house we have already started to prepare for the winter and Christmas celebrations.  With all the idea's on pinterest and around the blogging community it's hard to contain the excitement so we thought we would get an early start. 

During the summer we made a collection of sun catchers using pony beads. These hung beautifully from the Curtain rails and  lights in our living room catching the light that came through our patio door and reflecting rainbow colour's onto the walls around the room. This was a great activity which make next to no mess and can be done with children from 3+. My older children loved this activity so much that I promised to stock up again and make some over Christmas. 

I took the children for a Christmasy shopping trip to Hobby Craft and was amazed at the large displays already in place to help keen crafters stock up on supplies. The children loved looking around and loved the cardboard tree's and snow men sitting proudly on the top shelf. Looking around the rest of the store P spotted the beads section and selected a pack with plain and another with glitter. 

Making your own melted decorations is very simple to do and there are many possibilities for what you can make. As I mentioned before we made some beautiful sun catchers in the summer and along with many more snowflakes to be made we also plan to make a star to go onto of our Christmas tree.

Resources you will need:

• Plastic beads
• An oven 
• Tin foil 
• String

Cover a baking tray with tin foil and then carefully place your beads into your chosen pattern. If you would like to hang the decoration make sure you leave a hole at the top as we have in the photo above, this will create a hole for the thread to go through. 

We made our pattern using pictures found on Google of snowflakes. P decided to use a mixture of stars, glittered beads and plain. 

Place your bead art in the oven on 140 degree for roughly 20 minutes. Keep an eye on your beads and as soon as they have melted it is safe to take them out. It's a good idea to open a window as it can smell a little. Once dry you can peel the decoration off the tin foil and it is ready to hang. 

The children loved how the snow flake turned out so we hung it from the light in our living room. we plan to keep making melted art this winter to help brighten up the home and maybe even for some presents at Christmas.