Crafts: Perler Trigger Twins

After hours of playing Enter the Gungeon, and seeing these two guys, I couldn't stop myself from needing to make them out of perler beads. If you don't know what perler beads are, you're missing out. Made originally for kids to make simple things like flowers or soccer balls, us geeks have learned that they are a great way to make decorative pieces of all our 8-bit favorites. If it's your first time getting into Perler, I'll show you here how to get into this fun hobby.

First off what you're going to need is some perler beads of course! You can get these at your local craft shops and some big retail stores, or even amazon or directly through the Perler site. The best things you can get are the variety packs of the basic colors, but if you know you're going to use a decent amount of a certain color, be sure to buy a 500 or 1000 count back of that color, I cannot tell you how many times I've been halfway through a project and then I'm 20 or so beads away from finishing, but I'm missing a certain color. These variety packs come in separated containers, but they are not easy to open and close, so I bought some $3 containers in the craft section of a local store to separate my beads.

Once you have your beads, you need a base to lay them. You can either choose the squares that interlock, or a large rectangular single piece, I choose to use the squares so I have the chance to increase size later, and change the shape based on what I need. Start with what you need honestly, it's better to learn on smaller projects before making a giant four foot piece that can be easily ruined.

From here you are now ready to start making your design! There are many different programs that help you make a design, and even pick the types of colors you need, but I generally work from my own eyes, I find it's faster that way, and honestly, being colorblind, I just go with what I see. I used the cover photo up at the beginning of this post for the guide of my design.

I usually start with the outline if a design has one, that way I can have a good idea how large of a piece I'm working with. From there I work in smaller sections so I can use each piece as a guide for the next, it's surprising how difficult it can be to copy a pixelated design, but sometimes it's not so clear!

Here I have everything filled in! Though now isn't the time to relax and feel done, because the hardest part is after this, the ironing. You can easily ruin your whole project in this step, but I'll do my best to give you the information to stop yourself from doing this! This part can be tricky, but in the long run, it'll lead to a more solid piece, and your bases won't warp because of the heat if you do this. Slowly but surely lay down long strips of tape across your project making sure you overlap about halfway for each new row. By the end you should have something that looks roughly like this:

After this, you need to pull your piece off and flip it, it's pretty scary but let me tell you this, put as much pressure as you can evenly on the whole piece, and the tape should stick, after that stragglers are an easy fix!

As you can see here, I missed about 6 or so beads, and those can literally just be put back into their spots. The most important part of this process is to make sure all the edges are taped well. Following this step, you can either use scissors or an exacto blade to trim the tape, either way I recommend it because it makes the ironing process easier. Before you start ironing, do not put it directly on the beads, it'll burn right onto your iron and then you'll ruin both your iron and your piece, melted plastic can be very unforgiving. Make sure to put down either the paper that comes with the beads, or even parchment paper, which is sometimes easier to get to be the size you'd like. After this, you need to carefully run your iron over the piece on a medium head making sure to slowly keep moving the iron around. You'll see the centers of the holes of the pieces shrivel up, and that's when you know the individual pieces are melting.

Make sure to get your edges once again, it's easy to put the pieces back and iron again rather than mess up the edges and have it fall apart. Keep an eye on the heat, and make sure everything is getting uniformly ironed down, in some spots you can even use the edge of the iron to pin-point melt some tricky areas. After this I usually leave some books or something flat and heavy on top to keep the piece from bending. Here is a closer look of the melted beads:

From here you move onto another scary part, peeling the tape. if the part is melted well enough, you have no worries, but if you didn't you can pull apart your part a bit. Either way, things can be fixed, you just need to be careful to melt everything uniformly.