July 9

PixelHobby

pixelhobby

Are you familiar with PixelHobby? To quote their website:

PixelHobby is a new mini-mosaic craft. (…) PixelHobby designs are based upon small plastic tiles called Pixels. Pixels are available in over 300 beautiful colors. The molding process creates a soft plastic tile with a matte finish. (…) Each pixel location on a baseplate provides a small peg onto which a pixel is positioned. No adhesive is necessary to hold a pixel onto a baseplate since a snug fit occurs between the pixel and baseplate peg.

You can show your passion on 4×5 inch baseplates, but also use medaillon-sized plates. I’ve already spotted PixelHobby in my local crafts store, and in various online shops, including their own.

The PixelHobby website offers various designs. If you want something unique, get the PixelHobby Designer Lite and make your own pattern based on photos, art and other images. Or, recreate a sprite! One of my favorite websites for this purpose is Spriters Resource. And finally, nothing keeps you from going with the flow. Don’t use a design or pattern if you don’t feel like it.

PixelHobby

Here’s a small preview of what you can do with the craft. Wacker00 is a real genious when it comes to PixelHobby and perler beading and you should definitely visit his DeviantArt!

April 9

Glass Beadwork Beads: Pokeball and Pac-man’s Inky

Last week Make: Craft featured a post on glass beadwork on wooden beads. As a bit of a dabbler in bead-weaving myself I was keen to have a go, and soon found myself wondering how to apply the technique to something geeky, as you do. What do you reckon to my Pokeball bead and Inky from Pac-man?

Glasswork beaded beads - Pac-man Ghost and Pokeball

It took some trial and error, and they aren’t the quickest of things to make, but enjoyable nonetheless. If you want to give it a go you’ll need lots of tiny seed beads (I used 3 mm), some tough beading thread and something to bead around. The tutorial uses wooden beads, but I used polystyrene balls from a craft store, so they are actually pretty lightweight.

The full beaded beads how-to can be found here. The tutorial is in Czech, but the images are easy to follow and you can see the Google Translate version of the page here.

If anyone has any suggestions for other spherical geeky things that could be beaded like this, post below!