A blast from the past, pt 2

The 1990's seemed to be the height of the faux finish craze in my town, especially that "crackled paint" finish.



The above set was my "homage" to crackle paint finishes. After making my first set painted paper beads, I decided to try using faux finish on my beads. Again using scrap paper for the beads, (this set was made out of an old term paper), I first painted a base coat on each bead. After that dried, I applied a layer of "crackle" paint to each bead. Finally, I added the top coat to the "crackle" layer. As expected, the top coat crackled quite nicely and I let that top coat dry before doing a final coat of clear acrylic to make the bead shinier.



This turned out to be even more labor intensive than just the plain painted beads. I took me about two weeks to do my first painted paper bead set. This set took about a month.

A blast from the past, pt 1

Digging through some of my old photographs and slides, I found some pictures (albeit bad ones) of some of my earlier experiments with paper beads.



The above picture is the very first jewelry set of a necklace, bracelet and earrings that I made that was designed entirely of paper beads. I made this set in 1991 and it was mostly experimental. I had bought a small little craft gadget called a "Bead Crafter" that was basically a jig for making paper beads. When I first got the tool, I experimented with wrapping paper, ripped out pages from magazines, even scrap paper. The results were interesting, but they weren't exactly what I envisioned and I was worried of course about durability. Wrapping paper made for a rather flimsy bead.

Later, I experimented with painting the wrapping paper beads with a kind of clear acrylic coating to protect the beads and make them a little harder. A light bulb snapped in my head, "What would they look like painted?". I made a bunch of rolled beads out of scrap paper (I believe this particular set was made out of an old chemistry exam) and hand painted each of them with acrylic paint. The result was paper beads that had a sort of plastic look. They were still light, but much harder and much more waterproof. That set spawned a small series of painted paper bead jewelry.