Fruit-Inspired Drink Covers

These adorable drink covers are a fun summer craft for kids that bring back allll the memories of my childhood Perler Bead crafting days. This little drink cover craft was the spark for hours and hours of bead creations by my kids. A quiet, creative, fine motor skill activity that doesn’t include electronics, why haven’t I introduced this to them sooner?!

What you’ll need:

• Perler Beads, or other similar melty beads in the colors you desire
• Circular bead peg board – sometimes these come in the package with your beads, just make sure
• Iron
• Parchment paper or ironing paper. These also may come with your beads.
• Glasses or cups with less than 3″ diameter rim (unless you have a larger circle pegboard)
• Tweezers (optional)

For this craft, we actually used an off brand, Go Create Melty Beads because that is what was available to add to my Walmart Grocery Pickup. They worked just fine for us, though I’ve read that not all melty beads are created equal so best to read reviews before buying another brand. My kids have already requested this huge container of Perler Beads so they can have more colors and continue binge creating bead craft after bead craft. Our Melty Bead box came with 3 peg boards. The circle fit perfectly at the top of our glasses but may be a little small for other glasses. The largest diameter we could make was about three inches wide. Our toppers were 15 beads wide.

My kids started out by selecting their beads and putting them on a paper plate so they didn’t roll off the counter to be eaten by the dog. They are now sorting the beads by color so they won’t have to dig through to find their color beads in the future- another quiet activity! Perler Beads makes a Stackable Storage Container to use for sorting the beads. Totally worth the cost for extra quiet time activities in my opinion!

You don’t need tweezers to place the beads but some kids may enjoy using them. My son just used tweezers that we had on hand. Perler Beads makes a set of tweezers specifically for bead creations. Then they placed them on the circle peg board in fruit patterns.

If you are planning to use these for drink toppers, make sure to leave a hole in the center or closer to the edge to fit your straw through. If you want to skip the holes, use these as cute drink coasters instead!

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Next, ironing! Obviously, unless your kids are old enough and careful enough, you will have to get involved with this part. We covered their creation with the parchment paper and ironed them with an iron set to medium heat. NOTE: Make sure there isn’t any water in your iron as you don’t want to steam iron them. First we just held the iron on top of the paper covered beads for about ten seconds, being careful not to dislodge any of the beads from their pegs. Once they started to melt together, we moved the iron in a circular motion until all beads were fused together. You can see through the parchment paper, how well things are melting. Ours didn’t always melt evenly, so we would concentrate the tip of the iron on the areas less melty. This is what it will look like when you’re done:

After it cools for a minute, carefully remove your creation from the peg board. At this step, some people who prefer the smoother melted side will flip their drink cover over and iron the other side so it looks melty on both sides and is stronger. We preferred the almost pixelated look of the un-melted side so did not melt both sides. If you want to be REALLY sure that your drink cover is flat, it is a good idea to place a heavy book on top of it while it cools.

That’s it! If you make them and share them on social media, please tag us @saltsistermoms so we can see! We hope this activity provides hours of quiet time fun for your kids too!

Click the center of one of these images to Pin this idea for later:

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