Sun Catcher Art

I ran across an awesome are project so we tried it out. They were simple things we had in our house.
Translucent pony beads and muffin pans (luckily the muffin pans were not damaged at all.)

My biggest little has been dying for some art projects of her own and this was one she could use all of her creativity on.

We arranged the pony beads as we saw fit in the muffin pans, single layer. It was actually more difficult than we imagined, but still with a little focus...yes by a three year old...it can be done. Unbeknownst to us, we could have left the beads turned on their sides and gotten just as beautiful of a result. However we didn't realize this going in so we were careful to have each one laying perfectly in the bottom of the pans. Once we had all of them just the way we wanted, and some just dropped in haphazard just for fun. We cranked up the barbeque grill. Yes, you read that right, the grill!

With the grill set to low, we set the muffin pans on the rack and shut the lid, crossing our fingers that we didn't light the neighborhood on fire. This can be done in the oven at 400 degrees for about 45 minutes, but the fumes outside were pretty intense, I couldn't imagine that smell in the house...especially for 45 minutes. I checked them about every 2 minutes, at 6 minutes they were getting quite runny and by 8 minutes we had lit one on fire. OOPS! Don't worry, I quickly shut off the gas to the grill and blew out the flames. They weren't too worse for the wear. We let them cool about 20-30 minutes.

And now for the scary part, saving my muffin pans. They were completely cool, so I flipped the pan upside down and gently pushed on the bottom of each tin (think popping ice out of an ice cube tray). Much to my surprise them popped right out without leaving any residue in the pans. Notice the top left circle of the above picture, that's the one we lit on fire.

I drilled some small holes and tied some string on them to hang with a few thumb tacks on the window frame.

They turned out quite well, if I do say so myself.

This one is by far my favorite, though the pictures do not do it justice.

I foresee these as grandparent gifts in the future. I can only imagine the things we are going to find to melt into them. HA ha ha. I would imagine one could use just about any metal baking dish to create different shapes and sizes. But be warned, this was tedious in the small circles of muffin tins, an 8" cake pan just frightens me. I do think an angel food cake pan would make a fun sun catcher wreath....just a thought.