REVIEW: Super Beads by Zirrly

My artsy 13-year old daughter was happy try out the awesome Mega Pack of Super Beads by Zirrly!

WHAT IS IT?:

Super Beads are an innovative product that allows crafters of all ages to design projects on a peg board that don’t require glue or ironing in order to fuse them together!  Instead, all that’s needed is a generous misting of water and time enough to air dry!  And if a bead happens to pop off once your project is completed, just apply more water, air dry, and your beads will be fused together again!

There are lots of project-specific packs of Super Beads available for purchase.  We selected the Mega Pack, which includes 4,500 Super Beads in various colors, 4 assorted design templates, 2 spray bottles, 4 boards to use with the templates or for creating your own designs, 1 design tool, and instructions.

Just think of how many projects you could make with the Mega Pack!  The possibilities are endless.  It’s available for just $18.98.  They are safe and non-toxic.

OUR EXPERIENCE:

My daughter was so excited when our package came.  She ripped it open and spread everything out of the table to see what was included.  As you can see, that’s a lot of Super Beads and plenty of colors to choose from!  She started out using them out of the resealable bag, but I ended up sorting all of the nine different colors into little craft containers with lids to make it easier for her to find the colors she needed for each project.  I think I’ll invest in a bead box to keep them sorted in one place in the future, and that will make them easier to store than in separate containers, too.

Haylee has worked with other bead products in the past, both at our house and at a friend’s house, and it always required a mom to be present to safely finish off the projects with a hot iron.  Super Beads are so much easier to use since they only require water and time to air dry!  And with 4 boards included, she can make several smaller projects that can all be drying at once.  Or she can snap the boards together to make even larger bead projects!

Zirrly also sells some 3D project kits (like 3D Animals and 3D Car and Truck), and Haylee really wanted to try out something like that.  There weren’t any 3D instructions included in this kit, but since she is 13, she worked that out for herself!  She used the turtle template to make several of the turtles and then just fused the layers together so that her turtle could stand up by itself on the shelf!  It worked great and was easy to do.

The kit also included templates to make an apple, an elephant with a stand to hold it up, and a cupcake.  Haylee loves elephants and has a collection of them in her room, so she took a little license and gave hers rainbow ears!  Unfortunately, we found the stand pieces were not sturdy enough to actually hold up the elephant, which was pretty tall, so we weren’t able to get it to stand.

She said these were pretty easy to make, but the one thing she didn’t like was that all of the beads have to be facing the same direction.  There’s a little lip around one end of each bead, and all of those must be facing up.  She said it made her fingertips a little sore manipulating them all in one direction.  But she said the little spray bottles gave the projects a nice, even misting as she held the frames up in the air, and it took about 4 hours for the projects to dry before removing them from the frames.  Sometimes, when she would remove the finished project from the frame, a few beads would disconnect.  However, all you have to do is re-wet them to reconnect them.

Once I finished sorting the remaining pieces by color, I realized there was significantly more red, white, and blue than any of the other colors.  And there were a number of defective beads that weren’t completely formed, and all of them were white.  But with 4,500 total beads, there were plenty to go around!

Haylee said overall, Super Beads were easier to fuse than other types of beads she’s tried, and she said the projects remained very flexible once dried, so if you put on a wrong bead, you could work at pulling it off and replacing it with the right one.  This was a really neat kit, and the projects turned out colorful and really cute!  This Mega Pack will certainly allow her to complete a lot of projects!

Check out what over Crew members had to say about the many cool and creative Super Beads kits from Zirrly by clicking the banner below.