Believe it or not, pony beads can be used for more than just bracelets or hair braids. Melt them down, and you can make some pretty cool, stained-glass-looking things. I decided to give it a try with a display stand for our store. Here's what I ended up with:
It's a lot easier to make then you think. All I did was pour about half of our one pound bag of pony beads into a 10" cake pan and melt them in the oven at 425 degrees for 30 minutes. It smelled a bit like melting plastic in the house while I was doing this experiment, but that was pretty much what I expected to happen.
When they were cool, I just popped the piece out of the pan and sanded down the edge to take off some sharper pieces. Truthfully, there was a
very small line of plastic left in the pan which was easily washed away. The amazing thing to me was that the entire piece pictured below came out whole
without any more encouragement than just turning the pan over.
To make my stand look nice and shiny, I finished it up with a coat of Design Master's Master Shine. It also filled in some of the small holes left from air bubbles. When everything was dry, I used E6000 to attach a glass candle holder to the bottom. Instant decorative stand.
Hope you liked the idea, I had so much fun that I'm trying to think of other melted pony bead projects. Let me know if you can think of any!
Puna @ Enchanted Lake
There's a post from earlier today too, it links to our first Crankin' Out Crafts episode about fans. You should check it out!
