Joining larger bead projects

[Vincent]

Hi,

I've been lurking here for a while (and making the occasional bead sprite.)

Now recently I started on a fairly large project (about 180x120 beads, should be around 90x60cm when finished) , but ran into a pretty annoying problem.

I only have 6 29x29 pegboards (which don't all connect to each other), no problem I thought, I'll just make them, iron them slightly and join them together when I finish a couple. Now tonight I finished the first 4 so I wanted to join them.

But the tiles wouldn't fit on the pegboard anymore! They had shrunk slightly, I tried to stretch them over the pegboard but that didnt' really work and in the progress I messed up one of the tiles.

So how do you guys do it? Do you just make a giant pegboard and iron them all at the same time? Or maybe there's a secret technique to prevent them shrinking?

[Rozez1982]

What I do when I'm ironing a huge perler project is when they are on the pegboards I'll iron the first side. Then I pull it off and flip it over and get rid of the pegboards and just iron it on my table. I had the same problem with not getting it lined up in the pegs once it's ironed. And that works for me. Then I always put like books or something flat and heavy on my projects while they cool so they don't get warped from the ironing. Hope this helps. Good luck!

[LiquidKarma]

I don't think there's any way to keep them from shrinking. What i usually do on larger projects is iron a section at a time and put a book on it as I go. Then as I'm moving on to the next section i just push down the ironed beads that are starting to curl...iron...book ....repeat until the whole thing is done. I leave the books on for about 30 minutes and only then take them off the boards to flip over and do a second ironing.