Did You Realize The Extent Of My Organizational OCD?

Do you guys have those fusible beads running around your house? You know, the ones that often come in a big mixed up jar like this one:

You put them on some cute shaped board

or if you are one of my experienced fusible-beading kids, you can use the large interlocking squares and come up with your own designs. Then you can pray you get it ironed before it gets bumped and messed up. You'd think I speak with years of experience.

I do! Two year olds can stick a bead up their nose and still breath through the hole in it, so you might want to watch out for that age-warning thing on the package. Plus the ability to breath through the hole makes it much more difficult for said Buddy to blow the bead out of his nose.

After years and years of children loving these beads and making masses of projects and me ironing them while I silently cursed the invention of them, because I've ironed more bead projects in my life than I've ever ironed clothes, I found out some things about fusible beads.

You can get them in single color packages! I found them on the internet, because let's face it, I think you can find anything there. I'm going to give you the link in case you have bead-crazed kids and didn't know this, and the company doesn't have a clue I'm doing it. Their name is KoolStuff4Kids, and I think they have a separate place you can go if you have Sculpey-clay obsessed kids.

But my favorite thing — if you purchase nine bags of beads, you get a free container for sorting. One bag of beads fits perfectly in three sections front to back.

Now I think you can buy these to your heart's content at Wal-Mart and places like that, and I think I actually did get a few of mine there. But if I'm buying nine bags anyway, I like free stuff. So here is where all the bead boxes are stored:

and here is a view of four of them up close and personal:

I have been known to take a spoon and move a row of beads over to fit a new color in that is between two shades we already have. You don't need to say anything. I already know. And in case you are wondering why there seems to be a darker row down by the lightest color and think I'm losing my mind, they are slightly different. They are *clear* beads, like transparent, so they sit off by themselves. There really is a method to my madness.

In concern that you couldn't see the nifty tweezers they make to help you in beading, I took an up-close picture:

We do use them occasionally to help us move beads around on a board, but they are very helpful in getting the stray beads out of the other sections when they seem to run amok. They need to be used to get that white one out of the red box.

You might think this organization drives my kids crazy. Really, when you buy the beads and put them straight into the boxes, there is nothing to it. As long as you make sure your box closes, experience speaking, it is a simple method to use. My kids love not having to dig around to find the colors they need, knowing if they have enough for the project they want to make, etc.

Just to finish up, here is how we store our pegboards:

This is the two smaller baskets a little closer. They contain all the large interlocking squares and other large boards, and the second one has all the larger animal boards.

We throw all the other smaller boards into that third larger basket. We also have a lidded bin that we keep our extra bags of beads in that we've ordered and don't have room for in the organized boxes, but I figured if you'd stuck with me this far, you'd heard and seen about all you wanted regarding fusible beads.

This is the one craft project that all my kids have enjoyed since we bought the first ones about ten years ago. They now make a larger bead for smaller kids to join in the fun, and probably so they don't fit up a nose.