Perler Bead Sugar Skull DIY

Can we take a moment to talk about how beautiful Día de los Muertos is — both physically and spiritually? The holiday recognizes death as a natural phase of life and celebrates those who have passed away.

I won’t pretend to know the full extent of Day of the Dead festivities and rituals, but I love the belief that those who have died are to be celebrated. It’s obvious to mourn our late loved ones — to be sad that they will no longer tell our favorite stories, make their famous recipes, sing songs with us… There are many things to be missed about those who have passed, but we can honor and celebrate them by re-telling their stories, sharing the good times we’ve had together, making that same recipe for friends and family, singing along to their favorite song, and so forth. There’s this notion in Coco that you only truly die when you’ve been forgotten by the living.

But spirituality aside, the festivities are simply stunning — the outfits, the florals, the face paint, the sugar skulls... oh, the sugar skulls! I came across the graphic below on Hallmark’s Think. Make. Share. blog and kept wishing I could have the original!

But alas, I cannot. So I recreated them with Perler beads! If you’re looking for these beads, you can get them at any craft store.

My Perler bead plates are smaller squares, so I couldn’t flesh out the designs as much as I wanted to… or so I thought. Turns out, I completely ignored those little notches in my plastic bases that clearly indicated that I could have fit them together to make larger bases. The more you know… next time. Can you imagine a super huge Perler bead design? Hmm… I’ll have to explore that later…

So when you do this, you can take a sugar skull pattern that you like or create one yourself. If you’re going to make a pattern yourself, I recommend designing it on grid paper so that you know more likely what your end product will look like. If you’re drawing inspiration from elsewhere like I did, then you may have to modify the pattern to better fit on a grid. For example, my skinny guy doesn’t have asterisk eyes. Now had I realized sooner that I could have made a larger base, he very well might have.

Play around with the patterns, have fun with the colors, and remember to celebrate those who once walked this Earth. Todos somos calaveras!