Now what to do with all these beads?

Our Next purchase was the Perler bead tray with the idea book. Sticks (our 5 year old son) loves looking through the book and copying the designs.   The tray is nice for getting a small amount of several different colors that are organized, but we soon discovered that the amount of beads just weren’t enough.  

 After we decided to start buying the individual bags of the different colors we needed to figure out a way to store them.  While at the craft store we came across these containers on sale for 50% off.  They were a good idea, but they didn’t work for us.  We bead as a family and having to share got a bit annoying when everyone was grabbing for the same color.  They weren’t the easiest to get out and if we would have continued with this route, we would have ended up with a lot of these containers due to the large variety of colors available. 

Id was looking at a YouTube video of a guy making a large project and he had each color in its own labeled container.  I was skeptical at first, but we made it work.  Their are so many options out there for containers.  We found plastic ones at the craft store for $1 each and bought the last 4 they had.  They worked perfectly, but I didn’t want to spend that much or more on just containers and my OCD didn’t want a hodge-podge mess of different containers either.  Id came up with the solution...

We had a specimen cup sitting on a shelf from when he had his big V that he was supposed to take a back to the doctor, but never did.  We tried it out.  Unfortunately, a whole bag of beads do not fit in the containers, but I can deal with it for the price and the matchyness (yes, I know that’s not a real word, but it is one of mine).  Ebay has a lot of cheap auctions, some as low as 25 cents a container and their are a lot of other vendors out there with good deals if you search for them.  

I had a couple shallow plastic baskets that I had gotten from the dollar store that didn’t work for their original purpose.  The specimen cups fit perfectly in them and they stacked well on each other.  I have since gone back to the dollar tree in hopes of scoring a couple more similar ones with no such luck.  We plan on expanding our colors with Hama beads in the future so we’ll have to figure things out yet again when our collection expands.