Baking Dots

A scrappy buddy of mine tried a project last year of melting pony beads to make enamel dots for scrappy pages. When you purchase enamel dots, they are rather ridiculously priced and  you get very few in a package. Lynn did a whole post about the "how to's" which I will not repeat here. You can check out her post at Off the Rails Scrapbooking. Here is my process and how it came out.

#1. The lighting in my kitchen a night is NOT wonderful for photos so please bear with me. I laid out my beads on parchment paper and kept them far apart so they did not run together as they melted.

#2. I placed them in a preheated oven at 450 degrees. I started off at 8 minutes and added 2 more in the end. The purple were the first to melt. Next the black.

Eventually I took them out of the oven because my loved ones were sleeping and I was afraid toxic fumes or a fire might occur. And it would be a pain to run upstairs to retrieve them for evacuation. I removed the black and purple from the paper and then set the silver ones back into the hot oven that had been turned off to see if they would melt any further.

#3. The silver ones did not melt. They just cracked and sagged a little. They do look kind of cool, so I will keep them.

 #4. I did wind up with some nice black and purple dots in the end. Those are the colors I scrap more often than others, so I am sure I will use them up quickly. Now whether I will try this experiment again, only time will tell.

Until next time...