Mini Hama bead tiled Russian Doll picture

For Christmas a couple of years back my brother bought me a pack of Mini Hama Beads - a big bag of the mini beads in a huge range of different colours. If you are interested in trying mini Hama beads, this bag is a real bargain (although you'll need to get some boards too of course). There are some very subtle colour differences between the shades though, and I spent far more time than I'd like to admit sorting the beads out by colour into the little compartments in pill boxes.

I wanted to make some kind of picture that I could put on display, and it needed to use a wide range of different colours. I pin all sorts of Hama bead inspiration to my Hama bead ideas for me board, and one design that I found and particularly liked was some Hama bead Matroyshka (Russian Dolls) which I found among these mini Hama bead designs.

I took the basic Russian Doll design and added some extra patterning and background to make it into a square image

Crafting with mini Hama beads is a very delicate process. You need to use tweezers to drop the beads into position, and you learn to perfect a sort of flipping action to get the beads upright before you pick them up. I also can't count the number of times that I've given the board a slight knock and all the beads have fallen off.

I repeated the design four times in different colour schemes to produce my tiled picture. The design almost fills the square board, and each square uses 756 beads, so the entire picture used over 3000 mini beads. Luckily my brother topped up my supplies again at Christmas last year!

You do need to be very careful when ironing the mini beads, with a very quick iron on a low heat setting as they are so delicate. Now I just need to get them framed and on display!

You might also like some of my other mini Hama bead posts - a collection of mini Hama bead designs and mini Hama bead Easter eggs. You can see all my Hama bead posts together on my Hama bead page.

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