Big Crafty.

I don't know if it's the season for me to take on large projects or what, but the last 48 hours have been a whirlwind of finger cramps and eye strain...because I've been making a perler bead portrait.

Perler beads, in case the name isn't ringing a bell, are the little plastic beads that you arranged on a shaped pinboard and fused together with an iron in elementary school.

I never made anything interesting with them, until now.  For some reason I decided that my sister needed a perler portrait for her birthday.  Not of her, though:

 This is a portrait of Zachary Taylor, a US president I know nothing about.  Honestly.  I mean, I know he existed and junk, but I couldn't tell you a single thing he did for this country.  For some unknown reason, though, he is my sister's favorite president.  I honestly have no idea.

My setup, about 2 hours into construction...
The portrait was constructed using 12,177 beads.  I used an iphone app to convert my selected image into a perler dot format.  You could do the same thing in photoshop, by changing the color palette to approximations of perler colors--but that's a lot of work, I don't have photoshop, and the app was $3.99.  (you can get the app here.

Since my portrait was going to be large, I had to get the buildable board segments.  They snapped together like puzzle pieces.  I needed 20 tiles for this project.

 Here's a progress shot at the end of day one (yesterday.)  you can see my board here, and how the colored and clear segments are puzzled together.

 Another progress shot this afternoon.  I had to stop here and make sure I was placing everything correctly, because I thought it was starting to look like Jeff Daniels...

The completed portrait.  Before ironing.  I gotta be honest, I'm only about half done fusing this guy.  It's big.  And I needed to take a break and use my teeth whitening strips.  I'm still seeing a lot of Jeff Daniels in this thing, but Marie said that's cool.  If it looks like Zachary Taylor she'll tell people it's Zachary Taylor.  If it looks like Jeff Daniels, she'll tell people it's Jeff Daniels.

After the ironing, I'm going to get it framed.  My sister's birthday isn't until the end of November, so it might be gracing my wall in the meantime...

Now that I've made my mom a quilt and my sister a perler portrait, I have to figure out something for my dad.  I can't leave him out of all the crafty love.  His birthday isn't until January, though, so I've got a little time...  Suggestions?