DIY for Day 14- Making Paper Beads

3/10/14

Paper beads are easy to make and a great way to use old colorful magazines for your projects.

I like to coordinate the colors of magazine pages that I use with my project. The best tend to be fashion magazines or anything with a lot of images. A page full of words can be fun too, especially if you'd like to paint the beads after making them. I like to use travel magazines for landscape colors, wedding magazines are great for pastels and neutrals, and you can usually get some good full pages of bright colors out of magazines like Real Simple.

Fold your sheet of magazine paper into segments as long as you'd like your beads to be. Cut from bottom right to top left corner of each strip. You can use a ruler and pen to get an exact line, but it doesn't matter if it's perfect so you can also do it by eye if you can get it close enough.

 Start by rolling the strip with the right side out on a small tool like a crochet hook or a small paintbrush. Two things to watch out for here: 1. Be careful not to pull it too tight or it will be very difficult to remove from the tool, and 2. Angle the strip slightly so the center of the triangle is lined up with the center of the bead.

Making sure the point of the triangle is lined up with the center of the bead

Once you have it wrapped twice around, apply a small amount of glue all the way down to the tip of the bead. You don't need to use much; the glue spreads out pretty evenly. You may have to add a small drop at the tip of the triangle if it doesn't stay down.

Wrap 2-3 times and then apply a small amount of glue

Roll the bead until it's complete. Remove from the tool, and if desired you can snip off and triangle points that are sticking out. Often, however, they aren't noticeable and it's not necessary.

When your beads are finished you can use them as is, spray them with a spray lacquer for more shine, spray paint them either completely or just a bit, or apply glue to the outside with a paintbrush and dip them in seed beads.

Paper beads lightly painted with gold spray paint

Have fun!
xo,
Arielle