TBH my husband and I are actually fairly good at loading and unloading the dishwasher. But every now and then we get busy, distracted, whatever and then we’re trying to figure out if the dishes in the dishwasher are clean or not. I mean, I love smelling a baby bottle when it isn’t clean, it’s great! Haha, but to save me (us) from hopefully never doing that again I was inspired to make todays craft. I’m featuring it here in handmade holidays because I believe it’d make a really fun gift too!
This project takes about an hour and all you’ll need are your perler beads, gorilla glue/super glue, iron, and the accessories needed to melt the beads. I followed the instructions on perler beads’ website for melting because they had fantastic tips! Obvs it’s their product and they should!
I started with my square pegboard and skipped one peg in and then started to spell out clean. Once I spelled it out and like what I made I turned it so it was upside down and spelled out dirty. I did this so the correct one is right side up! You can also see I chose to make the clean word blue and the dirty word just random colors. Haha, ‘dirty word’. *side note, I didn’t want to re-do it but I later thought I could make them, “clean” and “Gross” I think that fits too.
Once I had my words done and the surrounding pieces in I could go ahead and melt the beads. I also took this opportunity to make a few bonus coasters. I also thought about making these ornaments. The pizza one glows!
I even took a small square one and dropped colors at random and then filled it in with a solid color – until I ran out of that color so I improvised! I was going for a terrazzo vibe but I think the colors on the sides threw it off.
Once you’re done delaying melting your beads (haha and by you, I mean me) Get the paper that comes with the perler bead sets and place it on top of your perler beads. Carefully move your iron over the beads in a circular motion while on the lowest setting. Once the beads are melted you’ll want to melt the other side of them. Be careful, they will be hot.
Once they’re cooled you are done if they’re just coasters, but if you’re turning them into magnets or ornaments you’ll have to complete a few more steps. For the dishwasher magnet I tried to hot glue the magnets to the back and I might have been too impatient and it wasn’t working because I only waited 5 minutes before trying to use it. I ended up resorting to Gorilla Glue-ing the magnets to the back of the clean/dirty sign. I clamped them by placing the sign on a rag, so the magnets were face up, then I placed some heavy books on top and left it overnight. In the morning, I removed the books and it was good to go!
I didn’t turn any of these into ornaments but you could thread some yarn through a bead, or you could gorilla glue some looped yarn to a part of the object!
It has been really nice over the last week to know if the dishes are clean or dirty. We also have to actually flip it, but I’d so we’re probably 95% good at it haha.
Who do you think you’ll gift a clean/dirty dishwasher magnet to? Or do you think you’ll just make some coasters and ornaments? Also these would make great gift tags that can double as ornaments! I can’t wait to see what you guys come up with!
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xoxo
-Robin
