Making Paper Beads

After I’ve made my paper beads roller that I presented yesterday I played around with paper beads a little more.

I prefer the tube beads anyway (marginally ;-)) and after having seen the paper bead designer I thought: ‘Yes, a little bit of colour is enough, you can’t see the rest anyway.’

So I quickly made me some doodle paper beads ;-)

And that’s what you do:

First I took two sheets of plain printer paper and simply doodled at one side with a blue ballpoint pen.

Then I cut the sheets in strips of the same width…

… and rolled my paper strips with my nifty paper bead roller in a wonderful short time.

Of course the hole of the bead is split into two holes, too, because my bead roller consists of two halves.

I ‘stirred’ the hole again with a toothpick so that only one big hole remained.

Somehow I didn’t want to use the glue excess as varnish for the beads, so I used a simple glue stick and covered the beads afterwards with medium gel. Here you can see them drying.
My potted palm got special leave on my balcony for it ;-)

Although I find my doodled paper beads beautiful I thought that I would look boring if I string only them, therefore I made some additional easy Peyote beads.

Looks good, doesn’t it? ;-)
I wasn’t sure yet what I would do with my beads on this photo.

It became a bracelet in the end. I simply strung the beads on an elastic and hid the knot in a bead.

And here an ‘action shot’ ;-)
It’s not so easy to take a good photo of your own arm ;-))

 

After I had finished with my doodled paper beads I thought, that this was a great way to make a lot of matching paper beads from advertising flyers.

So I picked an ad with a photo of bed sheets where I liked the clour scheme.

Then I measured the circumference of my doodled paper beads with a string and cut strips from the ad a little broader than necessary.

I glued the strips from the ad at one side of a plain printer paper sheet and cut the resulting papers in (in this case) 1 cm broad strips, because I wanted to have little beads.

I glued some patches from the rest of my ad on details that I didn’t like, they won’t to be seen on the bead.

Here my beads are drying on a wire because I cut about 80 paper strips and I don’t have enough toothpicks or plants for the drying process ;-)
This time I used a water-based craft glue that glues fast but dries slowly.
This is great because I could varnish my beads easily with the excess of the glue which made them shine and when my fingers eventually got sticky I could wash the glue easily away with water.

I have not yet finished, but I find my paper beads beautiful, a little bit like made from Jade.
We will see what they will become :)

Links:
Paper Bead Designer

Peyote Bead (Beaded Bead)

Here at unikatissima:
Paper Beads Roller
Entries containing the words ‘paper’ and ‘bead’