How to Make Pacman Ghosts & More - Hama Beads Tutorial

Hello fellow Hubbers, today I bring you a tutorial for creating geektastic charms with Hama beads. I will show you a few designs and provide a grid for you to create your own designs but more importantly I will provide a step by step guide with pictures on how to make a Pac man ghost from Hama beads.

Edit: I now have a new hub with four South Park Designs you may choose to use for this tutorial instead, you can find it here.

Designs

In the above photo you can see just a snapshot of some of the charms I have made, all of their designs are easily created because they are based on 16bit graphics. You can readily find designs and inspiration from sites like Flickr and Crafster or you can search Google for gaming sprites and copy them pixel by pixel onto the grid I have provided below, the grid is based on Hama’s standard 29 x 29 pegboard. Just download the picture and open it in paint or a similar program and bucket fill in the squares until you get a design you like. I have also provided the templates for the Pac man ghost, Mushroom from Mario and a Space Invader.The last two are at the bottom of the hub.

The designs above can easily be customized to your preference and as such I’ll be using the ghost template but with a different colour scheme; pink and glow in the dark eyes.

Step by Step

1. First assemble your materials and the coloured beads you will need. A Hama colour swatch can be found here. As can be seen in my picture you will need some beads, a pegboard, some greaseproof paper or ironing paper along with an iron and some heavy books which I haven’t pictured.

2. Ok grab a pegboard , your design and the associated beads and mark out the outline of the ghost in beads excluding the eyes

3. Once you have got your outline fill in the eyes as pictured below and dictated by your design

4. Now we have all the details marked out we can fill with our block colour, I like to do this in a methodical way by going row by row until it’s complete.

5. Transfer your creation where it is somewhere safe to iron and warm up an iron to high heat.

6. Place a layer of ironing/greaseproof paper over the design and press down firmly with the iron for 30sec until it’s all melted together. I find a circular motion works well and using the tip of the iron to get into those fragile sections of the ghost such as the edges.

7. Once ironed drop some heavy books on the ghost with the paper still on it to prevent the charm curling

8. If you’re like me and a bit anal and would like your charm to last longer I suggest ironing the other side of it. Remove it from the pegboard and place ironing paper on the un-ironed side and repeat step six. Make sure to drop some books on it again after ironing to prevent curling.

9. Viola! We are done and you can see the completed pink ghost below.

What now?

Wooop, you have successfully created a geeky Hama bead creation! There are many things you can do with it now some suggestions are below:

• Just stick them to your walls with blue tack like I do.
• Insert a split ring into it and have a funky zip puller or key ring
• Screw some tiny eyelets into either side and attach and chain and some jewellery findings and you have got yourself a super geek necklace
• Make loads of small charms, maybe food related? And have yourself a cute charm bracelet.
• Make two mirror opposite charms and attach some jewellery findings for some fresh earrings
• Incorporate them into a photo frame
• With the Mario Mushrooms you can add a blue background and a black border in the shape of a square and have some funky coasters, I made these for my sister once.
• Edit: I now have a new hub with four South Park Designs you may choose to use for this tutorial instead, you can find it here.

There are many more uses for these charms and your imagination is the only barrier to their capability.

I hope you have enjoyed this hub, be sure to follow me for more fun articles.

Thank you for reading!

Mike