Futurama Coasters and More!

I promise I won't be renaming the blog Futurama Crochet and Cousins anytime soon. It's purely coincidence that we've got two Futurama posts in a row. I think the joy of having new Futurama episodes on TV for the first time in years has been pretty inspiring for a lot of geeky crafters.

First up are these awesome coasters created by Craftster user zombiecakeses. Whether you call them Hama beads, Perler beads or Fuse beads, they work in the same manner. Create a pattern on a peg board with the beads, iron the beads so they melt slightly and stick together, then remove the peg board and you have your wonderful pixelated creation. Search online or look in local craft stores or the crafting aisle of major toy stores for the beads. In stores they usually come in a mixed bag of colours, where as online you can usually order bags of a single colour. You can also check out my Perler Bead Tutorial if you want more information on how to create patterns.

I love these coasters, not only because they are Futurama, but also because they aren't 16-bit video game characters. Don't get me wrong, I love my Mario Bros. and Pac-Man, but for a while it just seemed like that was all anyone was making with fuse beads. It's nice to see someone branching out to make more modern-day pop culture icons. Now I wonder if I have enough gray to make that Bender head...

I also wanted to share this work-in-progress because the brilliance of the idea blew me away. Craftster user heatheres76 is converting an old Clue game into a Futurama Clue game. Here you have the little game board pieces which she has sculpted herself. The brain slug is one of the weapons, not one of the playable characters. I can't wait to see what the other weapons turn out to be. I'm casting my vote for Torgo's Executive Powder. What would you suggest?

Katamari Prince Hot Plate!

Although it was much belated I finally got the chance to get together and exchange birthday gifts with some friends over the past weekend. My friend, the Infamous and Crafty, Lisa created this Perler Bead Katamari Prince hot plate for me. It's slightly larger than the video game related coasters I've made in the past so it will be perfect for setting teapots and other hot serving dishes on. Very cool! I totally want to pull out my Perler Beads and start playing with them again now. Lisa put this together using the free Katamari Prince cross stitch pattern that's available from johloh over on the Sprite Stitch Pattern Request forum.

While I was hunting down the free cross stitch pattern to share I also ran across these very cool pieces of Katamari art that are just too cool to resist posting.


The above picture comes from Etsy user loudxmouse. For $160 U.S. she will paint a custom Katamari ball or Katamari cousin into a scenic painting for you. I've seen these landscape paintings dubbed as "motel art", and now I'm thinking how awesome it would be to replace some of the dull artwork in motel rooms with Katamari pictures like this one.


This one is called Colossal Katamari and it was created by pixel artist Snake. Click on the image to see a larger picture of it and you can see how detailed the textures are on the monsters' skin. I believe what we have here is the Prince rolling up creatures from the video game Shadow of the Colossus. I've never played the game, but my boyfriend is a big fan.


I found this one on SF Weekly and it just made me laugh. How about a cross-over game of Lego Star Wars vs. Katamari? I'd play it!

3-D Perler Bead Vehicles! Cute Thing of the Week

If you grew up in the 80's there's a good chance you'll find something in Doctor Octoroc's 3-D Sprite Gallery to send you on a trip down memory lane. Along with this great Perler Bead version of the A-Team van there are a number of other very cool vehicles from the much loved tv shows and movies of my childhood. I'm a huge fan of Perler Beads, but there's no way I'm ready to graduate to 3-D creations just yet, which is why I'm so taken in by these. Imagine the time and patience it would take to put them together. It's also great to see someone whose doing something with Perler Beads other than video game characters. Not that I don't adore the video game characters, it's just cool to see something different for a change.

Doctor Octoroc says he was inspired to start making these because of the 3-D puzzles he put together when he was younger. Check out the colour detail on this General Lee from the Dukes of Hazard above. It's great that he can actually achieve that level of colour blending with Perler Beads, considering they don't have that many colours to choose from. Below is the Ecto 1 car from Ghostbusters. It's been a long time since I've seen that movie, too long!

These are just a couple of my favourites from the gallery. If they've captured your attention, I highly recommend checking out the whole collection.

They're Huge! And They Glow...

Everything is better when it glows in the dark, isn't it? And yes, I'm slightly obsessed with the going crafty MST3K chart because it is so versatile. In the back of my mind I still have plans for a giant tunisian crochet afghan made with this chart. I could then snuggle up in that afghan while watching MST3K and enjoying tasty beverages that are safely nestled on my new MST3K Glow-In-the-Dark coasters! These were made with yellow glow-in-the-dark perler beads and black beads. I bought a bag of 1,000 yellow beads and making these nearly used all of them. I have maybe a hundred left. I haven't put cork on the back of the coasters yet because I'm still toying with the idea of making them into fridge magnets. I like the idea of seeing their eerie glow everytime I pass by the kitchen when the lights are out.


I've discovered that with a basic digital camera and very little knowledge about photography it is very hard to take good pictures of things that glow-in-the-dark. Please excuse the blurriness of the photos, I just wanted to give everyone an idea of what the coasters look like when the lights are out. The top photo has been enhanced with Photoshop to show you the glowing effect. The second darker picture shows you what my photo looked like without any enhancements. In real life the glowing effect is quite nice and easy to see in the dark, especially if you let the coasters charge up for a few minutes in bright light.



Want to see my colourful set of MST3K coasters?

The Adventure Island Coaster Set!

I'm sure that for many Adventure Island is just another poor cousin of Super Mario Brothers, but I've always had a fondness for this game. I remember it used to get a bit mind boggling if you switched back and forth between Mario and Adventure Island because in Mario you're expected to jump on your enemies to destroy them, where as in Adventure Island touching any of the "baddies" leads to certain death. Of course, the graphics of Master Higgins, your main character, dying are generally so cute it's worth killing him a few times just to get a laugh.

If you're not familiar with the game...well, it's weird. In the way that many '80s Nintendo games are weird. Master Higgins's and his girlfriend are usually sitting around together at the beginning of the game when suddenly she's kidnapped by aliens/monsters/wizards/whatever and suddenly Higgins is off on a side-scrolling romp through the forest to find her, armed with an unending supply of hammers which he can throw at his enemies. His most common enemy, by the way, is a snail. It moves 2 mm (1/8 of an inch) per minute. You'd pretty much have time to get up and make yourself a sandwich before any of these snails could hurt you, if you didn't need to keep Higgins moving constantly to collect fruit and replenish the energy bar at the top of the screen. The fruit appears randomly in the trees and in the sky. Pieces of meat that look like chicken or turkey drumsticks also appear in the trees. Yeah, in the trees, like they're growing there.

Are you still following this? Sometimes you get a new power and he can throw a boomerang instead the hammer. Sometimes he rides a skateboard...in the jungle...on grass? Sometimes you unlock a small Honey Bee that flies along side you and gives you invincibility for a time. Starting with Adventure Island II, you can unlock a series of dinosaurs which each have a special "power" to "help" you in the game. These dinosaurs are adorable, as you can see from the coasters, but often more nuisance than help.

The game designers either thought they were being funny, or were just plain evil, because way too often you end up with the dinosaur that is the least likely to be helpful....Look you're in the world that's made of ice, but instead of the blue dino who can walk on ice, we'll give you the purple one that only moves well in water. Thanks game! Lots of cliffs, so you'd like to fly over them with the pteradactyl. Sorry, you have to take the annoying triceratops who rolls when you jump!

Strange dinosaur/world match-ups aside, I love this game. I love the look of it, the skateboard in the jungle, the surreal enemies and the general all-round weirdness of it. I like that the blue and red dino are the exact same design and that the plesiosaur kinda looks like he's wearing sunglasses, (which you would totally need if your specialty was deep-sea diving, right?) Sadly I never did manage to finish the game and reunite Higgins with his girlfriend, but maybe someday.

It's possible to get copies of the old NES Adventure Island games that will play on the Wii and you can also play it on your computer if you download the right software. Not that ambitious...try searching for "Adventure Island walkthrough" on YouTube and you can watch other people play the game.

And now a few words about the coasters...
A few posts back I provided this tutorial on how to convert game sprites into Perler bead patterns, so I think that sufficiently explains how these were made. The purple plesiosaur was the largest, taking four Perler bead boards hooked together to make. And the triceratops was the biggest headache because it took me forever to find a picture of him. Turns out he doesn't appear until Adventure Island III, but I'd only been looking for pictures from Adventure Island II. The sprites for this set come from RetroGameZone.

We accidently got a bit too much Gorilla Glue on some of these when we were attaching the cork. You can see it in the close-ups, but I'm hoping it will get worn away over time as we use the coasters. I'd also been hoping to make the pteradactyl in a lighter shade of purple, but didn't have enough beads in that colour. Aside from that I'm really impressed with how these turned out. When we finally had them all done and laid out on the table I had a great nostalgic rush. Just looking at these guys makes me happy!

Perler Bead Coaster Tutorial

I’m in the midst of making a new set of Perler Bead Coasters right now, but my progress has been stopped by the fact that we’ve run out of black Perler beads. So while I wait for my new bag of 6,000 black beads to arrive in the mail I thought I’d try to write out a tutorial for making video game based coasters.

I know I’m not the first person to come up with this idea as Etsy will attest, but I’ve seen very few websites that actually explain how you get from a picture of your favourite video game character to a finished coaster. You can certainly use the tutorial that Sprite Stitch has provided for making video game sprites into cross stitch patterns, but honestly that’s a bit more complicated than what you need to go through for Perler Bead Coasters. Perler Beads have a much smaller colour range than DMC embroidery floss does so you don’t need to worry (or have the luxury of worrying) about colour matching as much. For the coasters you should be able to use programs or applications that came with your computer and the process if fairly simple.

A quick word about Perler Beads

Perler Beads are fuseable beads that you stick on a peg board and then melt together with a household iron to make them stick together to form a picture. Once they’ve been fused together and made into a coaster it’s perfectly safe to set hot mugs of tea, coffee, hot chocolate, etc on them, however, I would not recommend setting hot casserole dishes from the oven or pans that have been on a hot stove element on top of them. This would probably result in a melty pile of plastic goo. As well, when the coasters get dirty just wipe them down with a damp cloth and a bit of dishwashing soap (if necessary.)

Supplies

To make a set of coasters you will need:

a household iron
sheets of cork (can usually be bought by the yard at a home supply store)
strong glue (we favour Gorilla Glue)
Perler Beads
Large Perler Bead peg boards (at least 2 maybe more)

When I first started working with Perler Beads I bought the large jar that contains 11,000 beads in a mix of colours. It’s a bit of a pain to sort through it looking for the colours you need, but otherwise this has been a great investment. There are enough of each colour in the jar to make at least two coasters with each colour. That is, two coasters that use a lot of red, two coasters that use a lot of green, etc.

After buying this giant supply I now just go online and replace individual colours as I need them. I like to buy from KoolStuff4Kids, but you can also make purchases directly from the official Perler Beads website.

The large square peg boards are 29 X 29 pegs, and they interlock with each other. If you’re picture is larger than this you can hook two (or more!) together to make your design. For me it’s been hard to find the large peg boards in stores locally, and I usuallly have to buy them online. I like to have a lot of them around so that you can set up 2-3 coasters and iron them all at once, rather than one at a time.

Finding a Suitable Picture

Do you already know who you want to make a coaster of? Has someone else already done it? If you’re making a Super Mario coaster or Pac Man someone else has already done the work for you. Check places like Etsy, Craftster, or Google Images to see if you can find a finished coaster with the character you want.. If you find one you can just copy the bead placement from their finished product. Save a picture of their finished product to your computer and look at it whenever you need to.

Want to create a coaster of a character no one else has used yet. To start with you need to find the sprite for that character or a good screencap of him. Some people have favourite sprite sites that they always turn to, but I like to just put my faith in Google. For this new set of coasters I’m making the characters come from a game called Adventure Island II and III. So I started with Google Images and searched for “Adventure Island II screencap” and when I found some pictures I liked I copied them to my hard drive. I also did the same search on regular Google and checked a few of the top websites that came up. Then I also searched for “Adventure Island sprite” and again copied results I liked onto my hard drive.

Always search using keywords like “sprite” and “screencap” and do a Google web search and a Google Images search. You will often get different results. Add the name of the game the characters come from to this search using “” around the title if it’s more than one word. As well, try searching by the name of the character you’re looking for and adding the workd “sprite” or “screencap”

If you get stuck and can’t find what you’re looking for it might be a good idea to hit Wikipedia and refresh your memory about the game you’re looking for. When I was trying to find the pictures for these coasters I couldn’t find any pictures of the green triceratops from the game. I had only been searching for Adventure Island II stuff, and it turned out that the green triceratops was only a character in Adventure Island III. Knowing this earlier would have saved me a lot of time!

Telling a Good Picture from a Bad

If you’re lucky enough to get sprites of your characters these almost always translate perfectly into a Perler Bead pattern. If you only have screencaps, it can be a bit more problematic.

Open one of the pictures you’ve saved to your hard drive in any program that will allow you to view it and zoom in on it. Now Zoom in a lot, until you can see the pixels.




See the difference here? You want to use pictures that look like the Blue Dino when they’re enlarged.

Pattern Making Options

So, now you’ve got pictures of the characters you want to use. Zoom in on them until you can see the pixels at a level you’re comfortable with. It may be even bigger than what I’ve done here. When you start placing Perler Beads on your peg board each bead will represent one pixel. You can count how many pixels your character is in height and width to determine how many peg boards you will need.

There are lots of options for how you can use your pictures as your pattern. If you’re comfortable making your coasters in front of the computer than you can just open your character picture and zoom in on it until it’s the right size every time you want to place pegs on the board.

Alternatively use your computer’s screen capturing tool to take a picture of the character while it’s enlarged. Then you can just open this enlarged copy when you want to work on your coaster, or make a print out of it if you want to work on it away from the computer. Don’t have a colour printer, or don’t want to waste ink? Take a piece of graph paper and fill in squares to represent where all the black beads will go. This way you’ll just have to refer to the picture on screen when it comes time to fill in the coloured areas.

Bead Placement

Not much to say here. If your design is small enough try to start it about two or three rows away from the edges of the peg board, (which I failed to do for this one). You’ll find this makes it a little more sturdy while you’re ironing it.

Ironing

Follow the instructions that come with the Perler Beads. My boyfriend does the ironing part usually and his advice is melt the first side you iron really good to hold the beads in place and then melt the second side to a lesser degree so the beads still hold their shape. The really melted side will be covered up with cork when you’re making coasters so no one will see it. Also if you’re making a character with a lot of pointy edges like this red dino, while doing the first side, pick the iron up and set it down on the piece (for a couple of seconds) a few times, especially near the edges.

Iron a side once, let the piece cool a bit, peel back the ironing paper carefully to inspect your work. If some parts don’t seem to be fused together yet, cover the piece with ironing paper again and apply more heat where needed.

If you’re using more than one peg board then the board might try to bend a bit along the join line while you’re ironing. Be aware of this and carefully check this area to make sure the beads there are fusing together.

After you’re done ironing your character may not lay perfectly flat. If he’s curving a bit, don’t worry, adding the cork will probably fix this problem.


This photo shows the first side we ironed. Compare it with the photo at the top of the finished product. You can see the difference between the really melty side that holds the piece together, and the less melty good side in which the beads maintain more of their original shape.

Adding Cork Backings

Cut the cork so it is about 1/2 a Perler bead smaller than the character on all sides. Apply a thin layer of glue to one side of the cork board and stick it to the side of your Perler bead character that is the most melty. Place a stack of books or other heavy, flat objects on the coaster and allow it to dry for 12-24 hours. The pressure will help the coaster to stay flat.

Enjoy!

If anyone has any questions or useful tips they’d like to share, please leave a comment.

We've Got Movie Sign!

Just thought I'd let you all have a look at these coasters we made as a birthday gift for someone. It was part of a theme, as the gift also included a DVD boxed set of Mystery Science Theater 3000. The coasters are made from Perler Beads and I used the knitted MST3K chart that I had previously featured in this Cute Thing of the Week.



I bought a bag of 1,000 black perler beads from KoolStuff4Kids a few weeks ago and thought that the bag would last forever. Not so much. I used at least 3/4 of it making these things. It was worth it though. I really like the way they turned out and now I'm brainstorming other coaster sets I could make where the coasters look good individually, but set together they form a larger picture. We're also thinking of making a second set of these MST3K coasters, only using glow-in-the-dark beads for the background colours.

Super Mario Coasters

I've been wanting to play with Perler Beads since back in the autumn when I first saw Artoo1121's post on Craftster about the Nintendo Perler Bead Coaster Set that her boyfriend had made. Then a few weeks ago when I stumbled onto Sprite Stitch's weblog and specifically his Mario across the NES ages (revised edition) I knew it was really time to stock up on Perler Beads. Super Mario 3 has to be one of my all time favorite video games, probably because of all the costumes Mario gets to wear. I used a couple of the charts from Mario Across the Ages and a couple of the other free charts that Sprite Stitch had available on the site. (Check them out, it's a great trip back to the 80's!)




I had the fun job of actually positioning all the Perler Beads on the plastic peg board (kind of soothing actually, it's hunting for the colour you need in the giant jar of mixed beads that's the frustrating part.) My boyfriend, who is both wise and witty, gets the credit for ironing the beads to fuse them together and for glueing cork to the backs of each picture to make them more stable. Now, 2,784 Perler Beads later, we have our own set of Nintendo coasters. They're a little larger than your standard coasters, but the Mario charts were just too cute to resist.

Now I just have to decide what to do with the 8,216 beads that were left over.




This last picture is taken with the digital macro setting on the camera so that you can see what the coasters look like up close. It's not actually a solid mass of colour, the beads still hold their shape even once they're melted together.