Perler Bead Flowers

The girls have been fascinated by Perler Beads for the last couple of years, a little arts-and-crafts activity that in our house ranks right up there with Play-Doh and crayons, and that's saying something.

The beads are actually tiny plastic tubes, which can be arranged in colorful patterns on little micro-pronged boards that come with the sets.


Once a design is complete you iron the beads - through a sheet of wax paper - and they melt into each other, completing and cementing the creation. The boards, themselves, come in a variety of shapes - stars, circles, boxes, hearts, pocketbooks, etc.

I probably could not count the number of Saturday or Sunday mornings when we have found ourselves in the basement, carefully arranging our respective masterpieces, but a few weeks ago Ava struck upon an approach that has dominated the activity ever since.

She takes one of the boards, any size or shape, and fills it up with these little six-petal flowers. Her only standing rule is that the middle piece has to be yellow. She's quite specific about this, "because yellow in the middle is just like a regular flower."


Ava's inspiration actually reminded me of Madison's Play-Doh chips, which were documented in our 200th post, so I thought I'd put these on the site as well, especially with cold and rainy winter days ahead. No shortage of fun, we've found, in a bucket of Perler beads.