Perler Beads + Oven Baked Clay Pinch Pots {Easy DIY!}

Perler Beads & Oven Baked Clay Pinch Pots {Easy DIY!}

Affiliate links have been included for your convenience.

We so enjoyed making pinch pots last week (in case you missed it, you can read all about it here) that we thought we’d make a few more but change things up a bit and decided to incorporate perler beads with the oven baked clay.

What You’ll Need

Clay

Glaze

Perler beads

Paint brush

Clay conditioning machine (optional)

An oven

What to Do

Begin by taking your clay and kneading it a bit before forming it into a ball. You could also run it through a clay conditioning machine if you’d like. We recently purchased one and the kids have been having so much fun with it! It really softens the clay well and makes it so much easier to work with.

Once you have formed a ball with the clay, gently press your thumb into the center of the ball, being careful not to press too far down, as you want to ensure you have a sturdy bottom to your bowl.

Next, start gently pinching your bowl along the edges. Place your thumb back into the center of the bowl while you use your pointer finger on the outside of the bowl to pinch the bowl into the shape you’d like. Once this is done, you can keep your bowl as a round shape or you can form it into a heart, square, rectangle, or any shape you’d like. We settled on a basic round bowl.

Once your bowl has been shaped, begin placing the perler beads into the clay. You can create a pattern or use a particular color scheme but we decided just to randomly place any perler bead we picked out of our bucket of beads.

You can place as many or as few perler beads as you’d like into your oven baked clay.

Our eldest placed her perler beads all along the side of her heart bowl.

Our younger one decided to first mix the beads and the clay all together and then make her bowl.

Once you’ve finished adding the perler beads to your clay, it’s time to bake them! Place your creations on a basking sheet and put them into the oven according to the directions on the clay’s packaging. We kept a close eye on the oven, keeping our pinch pot bowls in until the beads starting melting a bit and then took them out to cool.

Once our pinch pot bowls had cooled, we brushed on a coat of clay glaze to give them a nice sheen.

It didn’t take too long for the glaze to dry and then we had lovely perler bead pinch pot bowls made with oven baked clay.

You can use your mini pinch pot bowls for little trinkets, jewelry, paper clips, or even in your little one’s play kitchen as servingware!

We love how colorful our mini pinch pot bowls came out! Don’t they just make you smile? 

How did your pinch pots turn out? We’d love to see them! Share with us on social media #theartkit

If you enjoyed this post, please share it! Or, pin for later:

 

 

 

I’m joining in with the Timberdoodle Blog Hop!