Melted Bead Suncatchers

Many thanks to The Artful Parent for this great activity!

We have a lot of beads in the office! So this was a great activity for us to try out.

We sorted the beads to add only (actually mostly clear beads).

We also took this idea from The Artful Parent, beading with embroidery floss, rolling into a coil and placing on a non-stick cookie pan.

We used regular sized and mini cupcake pans. 

We cranked up our outdoor grill to between 400-500 degrees.

These took around 10 minutes to melt. 

Once cool, they slid easily off the pan. 

We had a number of flower and sunburst shaped beads. 

Here we used star burst beads of various sizes, tri beads of various colors, and some orange opaque branch-like beads. 

We love the way this star burst only partially melted. 

And we love how these flowers stayed partially unmelted, 

and the blue one has a button that didn't melt at all. 

They were shiny on top. 

And matte on the bottom. 

Then we used a small drill bit and drilled a hole near the edge in each of our stained glass circles. We tied a string through each hole and hung each piece from a dowel and placed in a sunny window. They would also make great wind chimes since they jingle and clink against each other.