Yesterday, I made a beaded needle case, a beaded small tylenol bottle and a beaded quarter tube for a friend who is a college fresman. The needle case has a rolled up twenty inside it, and has a clasp to attach to the inside of a piece of clothing or a purse for cab fare home. The tylenol case is for headache medicine, of course, and can stay in a purse without getting all grungy. And the quarter tube will come with a roll of quarters, because college students live on vending machines, and vending machines live on quarters. (BTW, the containers for M&M minis hold a roll of quarters perfectly, and give the beader a little reward for her hard work)
Needle cases and the like are not always the most attractively colored things, and no matter how nice a job you do beading, some small portion will show through (especially in herringbone stitch, which is what I used). Conventional wisdom dictates that you spray paint or use model enamel to paint the items and allow to dry thoroughly for a day before handling.
There are a couple of problems with this: (1) I am not allowed to spray paint, because of my lungs (2) I don't have model enamel and have no intention to go to W*l-M*rt on Christmas Eve, and (3) time to wait for paint to dry?!? Get serious.
However, as the mother of a teenager, I have something similar in my house that works even better than the suggestions, costs me nothing additional, and dries pretty quickly: nail polish. DD and P/T D have huge collections of lurid nail polish, and I quickly found a purple shade that matched the beads I planned to use. The little brush inside the bottle saved me from hunting for a paintbrush (and much swearing), and the stuff dried quickly and looks great. I seriously doubt I could have found spray paint or model enamel that would have matched as well, or surved the purpose so perfectly.
To test and see if this method would work on things that won't be completely beaded, I painted one of those wooden pumpkin shaped boxes that gets a strip of brick stitch around the fat part. The lid and the edges of the side show prominently in the finished product. I have some cheap black (!) nail polish leftover from the kids' Halloween costumes, and decided that it would be the perfect tester.
Worked beautifully. Two coats were necessary, as the wood sucked up the first coat. The second coat dried smoothly and evenly, and has a terrific gloss. I let the first coat dry about 20 minutes before applying the second coat, and let the whole thing dry for about four hours afterward. The best part of this was the price: this is the cheapest nail polish going, about $0.50/bottle on sale. It's the "Wet and Wild" brand, marketed to teenagers, and comes in the most amazing variety of colors. The girls have yellow, blue, green, purple, black and many other non-conventional shades of nail polish that would all work with beaded projects.
And, because I am lazy, I saved myself a horrific trip to W*l-M*rt on one of the most insane shopping days of the year.
Yippee!
Kathy N-V