Since I wanted to try out some very different methods for this process of experimenting with different things, I decided to take a trip back down to memory lane and experiment with “Bügelperlen/Steckperlen”. I couldn’t really find the right english equivalent for this word, but maybe it is ironing beads or something similar. These are small plastic beads coming in different colours that you can form shapes with and then put some paper between them and the iron and iron them flat so that they melt together. With this technique you can make coasters out of them or charms or anything that is flat and comes to mind really.
The process is quite simple and repetitive, depending on the motive that you’re trying to make and the size that you want to make it in. You have a plate that is specifically made for these beads that has several elevated areas. The beads are not round, but cylindrical and have a hole right through the middle. This hole is supposed to be put on the elevated area in the plate so that the motive stays in place when you’re building it and especially also when ironing later on. Then you can either think about how to make something on your own or try to find some examples in the internet. I tried both methods, in order to see how each one works. The more creative approach is of course trying out how to create your own motive. It is a simple process, but it can take a while and needs a lot of patience, when the pattern that you want to make is quite big. Below you can see two pictures of my process. However, I also had to seperate the beads by colour since the packages that you can buy are always mixed. This added even more time to the process. But it is still fun and takes me back to my childhood, you might also want to retry some things that you’ve done in your past, it is quite fun.
The topic that I’m working on for these experiments is still the same as you can see: “food is political”. I decided to stay with the watermelon motive from the free palestine mouvement and also made some other fruits, an orange, a lemon and a cherry. The crab and the heart was just something I added for fun. The longest of these was the watermelon, which took ages and also shows some of the limitations of this medium. It looks quite pixel based, since you also only have limited ways to place the beads and filling large areas can take quite a while and be tedious, since the beads are small and you need to be able to work very precisely if you don’t want all the other beads to fall.
The last step in the process is the ironing and this ties it all together, since the beads melt into a flat mass that can later also be hanged on a window or used as a coaster, for instance, as I’ve already mentioned in the beginning. See below how my pieces turned out, front and back view.
