How to Make Hermosa Paper Beads

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.

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.

Everything you´ll need
Paper, toothpicks, ruler, pencil, scissors, and clear nail polish.

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.

Make a one inch mark on one end of the paper.

Make two half inch marks on the bottom

Draw a line from the one inch mark to the two half inch marks

Cut along the lines (wrong side showing)

Connect the two pieces of paper (right side showing)

Starting from the wider end, roll the paper around a toothpick, make sure the wrong side is up.

Keep rolling...

Roll until you get to the end, and then glue the tail on.  Once it´s secure, coat  with clear nail polish.

Then let it dry.

Enjoy your fun, sustainable, and hermoso art!