Fun & unique ways to make homemade suncatchers with plastic beads. We use translucent pony beads and melt them on the grill for these melted bead suncatcher crafts.
So, my friends, I promised I’d share the rest of our melted bead suncatcher experiments in one fell swoop rather than another 10 or so posts. I know I snuck in that post about the melted bead fairy wands in the guise of a birthday post, but I’m (mostly) trying to keep my word.
Here goes… More fun homemade melted bead suncatcher ideas!
7+ NEW Ways to Make Homemade Suncatchers with Plastic Beads
1. Rainbow Suncatcher in a Wood Frame
A friend of Maia’s made this rainbow melted bead suncatcher in a die cut wood frame (purchased at craft store) when she was over for a playdate. She carefully arranged the beads in rainbow order within the square wood frame.
2. 3D Heart and Star Suncatchers
We LOVE these 3-Dimensional Heart and Star Suncatchers that we’ve started making in metal gelatin molds. I picked up a couple of old metal gelatin molds at a thrift store recently to experiment with and they worked great for the melted bead suncatchers!
A Few Notes About the 3D Suncatcher Shapes
- We’ve made the homemade suncatchers with one layer of beads inside the molds and also with several. They work both ways.
- It’s especially effective to use different colors or color combinations within the various shaped areas.
- Harry drilled a couple of holes at the top of each and I added beaded hanging loops.
3. Shapes within Plastic Bead Suncatchers
We made shapes within the melted bead suncatchers using cookie cutters.
Here’s how to make the shapes within the homemade suncatchers:
- To make the shapes, we set a cookie cutter on the foil-lined baking dish (shown here with an embroidery hoop frame), filling the cookie cutter with one color of beads and the space outside of the cookie cutter with another (or with a mix of colors), then carefully removed the cookie cutter before melting the beads and fusing the design together.
- This is much quicker and easier than trying to create shapes bead by bead as when we’ve made jack-o-lantern suncatchers.
- We’ve created shapes within melted bead suncatchers in both wood embroidery hoop frames and just in metal cake pans (without a frame)
- You can use either metal or plastic cookie cutters this way since you’re not leaving the cookie cutter on during the melting process (unlike with the individual suncatcher shapes)
4. Spirals within Bead Suncatchers
This is another favorite! We’ve been making spirals, circles, hearts, and words within suncatchers using beads strung on embroidery thread.
These suncatchers are created much like the melted bead words except that they have additional beads around them. We string beads on embroidery thread, arrange the string of beads on a foil-lined baking dish into any shape or word desired (sometimes within an embroidery hoop, wood frame, or cookie cutter), then fill all the remaining spaces with contrasting beads.
5. Beaded Suncatcher Ornaments
I thought that smaller versions of many of these homemade suncatchers with plastic beads would work well as Christmas ornaments, so we bought a die cut wood ornament from Michael’s. Then we added the plastic pony beads to the empty spaces and melted them.
6. A Sugar Skull Suncatcher
We love this Day of the Dead sugar skull suncatcher! As with the star ornament above, we melted pony beads
in a die cut wood frame purchased at Michael’s. A couple notes:
- We used teal liquid watercolors to paint the skulls after the beads melted. The wood had scorched a bit and I wanted to cover that up and also add to the whole colorful look. Also, I knew that I could paint the whole thing with the liquid watercolors and then just rub any extra paint off the plastic beads (something that wouldn’t work so easily with other kinds of paints).
- The die cut wood skulls come with a hanging ribbon, but we removed them before melting the beads and then added a new one (after learning through trial and error that the ribbon disintegrates in the heat).
7. Beaded Wire Spiral Mobile
We created this mobile with a few of our melted bead spirals just loosely hooked onto each other. It hangs on our front porch and twirls slowly in the breeze. I just love it and would like to experiment more with this idea and form, adding more bits and pieces.
As you can see, we’ve been going a bit crazy with pony beads. My family is ready to move on to other arts and crafts projects and I think I am, too. Finally.
Want more ways to make homemade suncatchers with plastic beads? Here are our original 7 Ways to Make Melted Pony Bead Suncatchers.
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