Perler Bead Projects

   If you've been following my blog for a while, you know we enjoy doing Perler Bead projects as a family. We've made both Settlers of Catan and Hive out of them.

   Recently I decided I wanted to try using a cross stitch pattern as a Perler Bead pattern. I got on my trusty Pinterest and did a little search. I settled on a cross stitch pattern of the main Supernatural characters.

   If you've never used Perler Beads, they are these little beads you put on a peg board. They come in all sorts of colors. The peg boards come in many different shapes.

   Lay out your design on the board. You can use a pattern or your own imagination. I followed the cross stitch pattern but also mixed it up a bit. I guess it was mostly a guideline. Just make sure you leave a row of beads all the way around your project or else it will melt together. This includes diagonally.

   If you buy a kit, it comes with some type of paper you lay over it and then use an iron and melt them together. Be careful during this part. After you are done ironing, the beads will still be hot.

   You can carefully peel the beads off and lay it on a table or counter and do the same thing to the other side. Make sure you melt them as evenly as you can. If you miss a spot, they will fall apart. If you want to keep them flat, put them under a book or something while it cools. Otherwise it will curve a little.

   Once it's cooled, you can do whatever you'd like with them. You can string them up and put them on your Christmas tree. Give them to an older child to play with or put them on display. I have a nerd shelf that I have mine displayed on.

   If you want to try something a bit harder, I also found this pattern to make a TARDIS out of these beads. It was quite a project, but I couldn't help myself. It's a lot taller than I thought it would be. I changed a couple of things. I used yarn for the black part instead of embroidery thread. I also glued it together on the inside, she sewed it together. The top does come off, so you can keep stuff inside. I'm rather pleased with it!

Hive Review

   As some of you may know, hubby and I enjoy making things out of Perler beads. We've made a Settlers of Catan game and had so much fun we decided to do another one. This time we did Hive. I've heard this game mentioned quite a bit from other gamers. It's a fun little two player strategy game where you are trying to protect the queen bee. Before we get into how to play, lets make it!

   First you need your supplies. The game pieces are done in a hexagon shape so you will need some of these plates (the stars have a hexagon in the middle). The more you have, the less you have to walk back and forth to the iron. You will also need some beads. you can use whatever colors you would like. The game has black and white pieces with different colored bugs on them. So that's what we went with. We decided to use glow in the dark beads for the bugs. You won't be able to play it in the dark since you can't really tell which color the background color is, but it looks pretty awesome.

   Start by laying out the shape of your game pieces

   Next you add the design of your bug. You don't have much room to get too elaborate, so think small.

   Fill in the rest of the shape

   I'm not sure what happened to my pictures of the ironing process. If you buy a kit, it comes with directions. Basically you take the paper that comes with the kit, or you can buy them separate, lay it over the top and take your iron and evenly iron it so that the beads melt slightly and stick together. Once the first side is done, you can take it off of the plate and flip it over and do the other side. If you only have one paper, wait for it to cool before you take it off of the paper. Be careful, they get hot!

   Once you have ironed both sides, wait for it to cool a bit and peel it off of the paper. You now have a game piece.

   You will need: 3 grasshoppers, 3 ants, 2 beetles, 2 spiders and a bee in each color.

   Now, how to play. You take turns laying out your pieces. You must play your bee by the 4th turn. You can add pieces on any of your turns. Except for the first turn, they can only be touching your pieces when they first go into play. After they have been played, you can move them around the hive according to what each bug's move is.

   When moving your bugs around the hive, they have to be able to slide into any space. If they can't slide in, they can't get in there unless it's a bug that can jump or go over the top.

   You are trying to keep your queen bee from getting surrounded without breaking the hive. That means that the whole hive has to be connected at some point. As soon as a bee is completely surrounded, the other player wins. Be careful, if it's surrounded with your pieces, you will still loose. In this picture, white wins!

   Now, what each bug does. There are 3 grasshoppers. These pieces can jump in a straight line over any number of pieces.

   There are 3 ants, these can move around the outside of the hive any number of spaces.

   There are 2 beetles. These ones can move one space at a time, but can go over the top of bugs which makes the bug under it stuck. If it's on a bug, that piece is now considered to be whatever color the beetle piece is. This is helpful when trying to add your pieces on the other person's side.

   There are 2 spiders. These move 3 spaces around the outside. No more, no less.

   There is 1 Queen Bee. This piece can move one space around the outside of the hive.

   This is a fun little game to play. It takes a lot of planning and strategy. Game play doesn't take very long, maybe half an hour or so. This is a great game if you like putting a little more thought into a game but don't want to pull out a huge game. This game is also a great one to take around with you. It's easy enough to carry around that you could even play it while waiting at a restaurant. This one might be a little harder for younger kids. We haven't tried teaching ours how to play yet, so I'm not sure how my oldest would do. If your kid is good at strategies and thinking things through, I don't see why they wouldn't be able to learn it. It's not a hard concept to understand, it just takes quite a bit of thought.

Geek & Sundry

   As some of you know, the hubby and I LOVE watching Table Top. It's where we get a lot of our game ideas. When I started blogging, I decided I would follow a bunch of the big game people with my dormant twitter account that I didn't really use for anything. Table Top is on YouTube and is under Geek and Sundry. They have a lot of geeky stuff on their channel so naturally, I decided to follow Geek and Sundry on twitter.

   A day or two later they retweeted a guy named Paul that has a vlog on their channel. He was looking for nerd crafts people have done. I got pretty excited, shot a text off to the hubby and asked if I should send in this

   That's right, the hubby and I have made a Settlers of Catan board out of Perler Beads. It took quite a while but we had fun. It was a fun little craft about something we both enjoy that we could do together after the boys were in bed. We've even played on it before!

   I got an email back from Paul a lot faster than I thought I would. He said it was super cool and asked if I could send him more pictures. I snapped a few more

   Like as if we were playing a game on it.

   Just the tiles

   All of the pieces. I made sure you can see that the city pieces stand up.

   We made a nice stand up robber, the largest army and longest road cards

   The number tiles

   All of the ports

   And just because it was Catan related and another nerd craft, I even sent him pictures of the Catan pillow I crocheted the hubs for his birthday.

   The front

   And the back

   Here's some cookies I made hubby for his birthday. He decided he wanted this instead of a cake a couple years ago.

   This morning when I got up and checked Twitter, I saw that Paul had a new vlog post up. I thought it looked pretty interesting. I mean, who wouldn't want to make themselves some comic book shoes? I figured I had a sister or two that would probably think it was pretty cool as well and I wanted to see how it was done.

   I got it ready and told the hubby we should watch it. We watched Paul make a comic book shoe in fast forward, because that's how he does his crafts on his vlog. When he was done with the shoes he started talking about how he got so many responses for the nerd craft that he was going to do some at the end of each of his upcoming vlog posts until he ran out. Then we see our Settlers board! We were SO excited! I quickly rewound the video a bit so I could show our boys. The oldest one's jaw hit the floor and the middle one asked to watch it again.

   I never figured that one day I would be into all of the geeky nerd stuff. These days though, it seems like that's about all I do. I love playing games. We have many game nights with friends and many with just our family. I love watching Star Trek with my boys every night. My little one asks to watch "tar tec" and loves to "bum bum bum" along with the music. Once in a while he will look at me and say "Pace, the final frontier". We have passed our love of games and super heroes and all things geeky onto our children and that makes me happy.

   Ok, enough of my rambling, here's the video. Feel free to let me know what you think! 

   It has been brought to my attention that the video doesn't show up on a mobile device, so here's the link.