In Spanish, the word "hermoso" means beautiful. In Nicaragua it means beautiful as well as fat, or voluptuous, shall we say. Whenever I see one of my former Casa Materna ladies with their babies, I am always sure to tell them how hermosos (beautiful and chubby) their little ones are. So when I started to make paper beads with them, I was afligida (upset) to see how flacita (skinny) they were.
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| Pretty, but definitely not hermosas |
I kept seeing all these big and beautiful beads that others were making, and couldn´t figure out how they were doing it, seeing as how I was using up all of the magazine paper, but still kept getting these skinny little beads. Eventually, I decided that it has to do with the length of the paper you use to make the beads, and since I couldn´t find anything longer than the magazines I´ve been using, I decided to put two strips of paper together to make one long one. Here are the instructions with photos, so if you´ve never made paper beads, or you´ve never figured out how to make them hermosas, you can learn.
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Everything you´ll need
Paper, toothpicks, ruler, pencil, scissors, and clear nail polish. |
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| Fashion magazines are great, since they´ll always have crazy colors. This is the side that will be showing when the bead is done, so all marking will be done on the other (wrong) side. |
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| Make a one inch mark on one end of the paper. |
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| Make two half inch marks on the bottom |
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| Draw a line from the one inch mark to the two half inch marks |
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| Cut along the lines (wrong side showing) |
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| Connect the two pieces of paper (right side showing) |
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| Starting from the wider end, roll the paper around a toothpick, make sure the wrong side is up. |
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| Keep rolling... |
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| Roll until you get to the end, and then glue the tail on. Once it´s secure, coat with clear nail polish. |
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| Then let it dry. |
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| Enjoy your fun, sustainable, and hermoso art! |
