Fun with Hama Beads

Warning: lots of words and photos to follow...hopefully it will be inspiring so stick with me!!!

Whenever I have a stall at a craft market I like to have some items that are only a few dollars each. That way if customers wish to make purchases from many stallholders they can also take a little piece of Cupcake Cutie home with them too.

Previously I have made wee felt brooches and sold them but even a small brooch takes and hour or two to make so is not the most economical idea when I want to sell them for only $5 each.

So I have been playing with Hama beads...all I can say is 'Hama Beads where have you been all my life'. I am so addicted it is not funny. I am an instant gratification crafter and talk about about instant gratification, I can whip up about 10 or more of these brooches an hour.

Since the medium of melty beads is such a departure from my usual felt and floss I still wanted a to keep my themes so I delved into my cross stitch patterns and found suitable subjects...

Mr Hedgehog was my first pick - I knew he would translate well to beads. The thing to remember is that the beads are so much bigger than stitches so even a pattern with very few stitches can turn out quite large.

Do you remember Mr Owl from my woodland stitched house .....he made a great hama bead brooch...

Tip: if you are using cross stitch patterns you will need a square peg board where the little spikes are in a grid in line both horizontally and vertically.

Than I got really excited and experimental...I really wanted to make a doily and cameo brooch from beads...alas they just didn't seem to work, what looked great on the peg board didn't work when melted...

Then I dug into some vintage pattern books and found Mr Bunny, I altered him slightly, shortened the neck and added to the ears - I just love him. I had fun with different colour combos too...

Thought I needed another woodland creature and used bunny as a basis to make a fox...

 It took 3 attempts until I was happy with him...

Of course I had to make Bambi... I translated this one directly from a cross stitch pattern but it was just too big for a brooch (great Xmas dec though) so I designed a smaller version...

I made some little buttons and a giant bow which I have seen a lot on google and pinterest...

Because I have been in 'Hama Heaven' in the past couple of weeks I have even made enough to list some of them in my poor neglected Etsy store .

That is more than enough for now. I will share all my tips and tricks for using Hama beads soon.

I am also branching out into Hama Bead patterns which will be avaiable as pdfs soon so stay tuned!