I thought everybody in the US under forty knew about Perler beads! They're the best way ever invented for making RL pixel art (if you don't have the patience for cross-stitch.)
They're these little colored plastic cylindrical beads, maybe a few millimeters a side. While you can string them together for ugly jewelry if you're desperate, what they're designed for is that they come with these little pegboards, and you place the beads on the pegs in a specific design. And then if you apply heat with an iron over it, the beads melt together at the tops and form a single object, which is removed from the pegboard and can then be used for hundredsdozens ... a coaster.
(Okay, you could do other things. I think the last time we had them out, when I was in high school, we made a whole bunch of pixelated X-Wings, Y-Wings, TIE fighters, and blaster bolts, put magnets on the back, and had dogfights on the fridge for the next several months. The downside is that the objects don't hold up to wear very well - it's easy to break the seams where the beads are melted together, especially if it has a lot of protruding bits, and then your object falls apart.)
They were a huge fad when I was a kid! You could go in a craft store and buy the beads by color, in any quantity. They're less popular now, but you can still purchase them. My friends at Interrobang Studios who go to all the comic/anime cons tell me that there's somebody else on the circuit who has a GIANT pegboard (like, a couple hundred pixels on a side) and sells really elaborate Perler bead art suitable for framing - she did portraits of the two of them, and they really do look like RL video game sprites.
The more standard pegboards are only about 15X15 pixels, so you can't do much with them. I thought we'd got rid of our remaining collection, actually, because we had enough coasters. I haven't decided yet if there's anything I want to do with it (other than attempt some Commander Keen sprites) but it's going in the craft room so I don't forget about it again.
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I thought everybody in the US under forty knew about Perler beads! They're the best way ever invented for making RL pixel art (if you don't have the patience for cross-stitch.)
They're these little colored plastic cylindrical beads, maybe a few millimeters a side. While you can string them together for ugly jewelry if you're desperate, what they're designed for is that they come with these little pegboards, and you place the beads on the pegs in a specific design. And then if you apply heat with an iron over it, the beads melt together at the tops and form a single object, which is removed from the pegboard and can then be used for
hundredsdozens... a coaster.(Okay, you could do other things. I think the last time we had them out, when I was in high school, we made a whole bunch of pixelated X-Wings, Y-Wings, TIE fighters, and blaster bolts, put magnets on the back, and had dogfights on the fridge for the next several months. The downside is that the objects don't hold up to wear very well - it's easy to break the seams where the beads are melted together, especially if it has a lot of protruding bits, and then your object falls apart.)
They were a huge fad when I was a kid! You could go in a craft store and buy the beads by color, in any quantity. They're less popular now, but you can still purchase them. My friends at Interrobang Studios who go to all the comic/anime cons tell me that there's somebody else on the circuit who has a GIANT pegboard (like, a couple hundred pixels on a side) and sells really elaborate Perler bead art suitable for framing - she did portraits of the two of them, and they really do look like RL video game sprites.
The more standard pegboards are only about 15X15 pixels, so you can't do much with them. I thought we'd got rid of our remaining collection, actually,
because we had enough coasters. I haven't decided yet if there's anything I want to do with it (other than attempt some Commander Keen sprites) but it's going in the craft room so I don't forget about it again.