Hello again! I’ve been pretty bad at updating the blog lately. We’ve been super busy redoing our storage closets and deciding on some new flooring. I also recently tried a paint by diamond craft I found on Amazon and it was actually pretty cool! It took forever (and a lot of patience) to stick the tiny “diamonds” to the paper and after a while I just wanted it finished so I could have a clean room again but all in all, it turned out awesome and I just love how sparkly it is! It looks amazing in my shoe room over my desk.

But now we are moving on to what you actually came here to read about, how to make Super Mario 8-bit plants.

Why we Needed Super Mario 8-Bit Plants…

As I’ve mentioned in previous Super Mario blog posts, we have two “levels” in our basement: a water level and a land level. When planning the land level, I wanted something to decorate the area but we of course couldn’t have normal plants. I started playing around on Pinterest and found some 8-bit plants made out of Perler beads and decided that was just what I needed for my tables. I decided to go with two of the piranha plants and the fire flower.

Where to Buy the Materials…

As usual, I bought everything from JoAnne Fabrics but you can purchase these at any craft store. I bought three small clay pots, Perler beads in white, black, red, green, yellow and orange, a Perler bead board, some sort of plant filler to put around the base of the flowers when they are done, floral foam (you can actually get this at the dollar store as well) and some green spray paint.

How to Create the 8-Bit Plants…

First things first, I spray painted all of the pots green to look like the Mario pipes and left them to dry.

Next, I made the flowers. I made this easy on myself and searched Google for Perler Bead Super Mario flower patterns and you will find a bunch! Here are the patterns I used for the projects:

Piranha Flower 1

Piranha Flower 2

Fire Flower

Just line up the beads according to the pictures and you will have an awesome flower! In order to put these in the pot, I added rows about 5-6 beads thick on the bottom to make a stick to put into the floral foam. Also, a giant mistake I made was to use parchment paper instead of wax paper to iron these. This does NOT work and will ruin your flower. So make sure you are using wax paper before you iron them!

Once the flowers were completely cool and the the pots were dry, I glued a piece of the floral foam to the bottom of the pot with hot glue and gently stuck the flower into the foam. Do this very carefully as these do break easily! You might be able to glue a popsicle stick to it if you need to but I was able to stick them in without breaking the beads and they are still standing today. I then put the plant filler around the bottom of the plants and now you have 8-bit Mario plants!

We found red tables ($10 each) and green carpet at IKEA which we thought went nicely with our Mario theme so here are the plants in our Mario room! Again, our basement is not finished and it’s pretty dim down there so it’s really hard to take good pictures, but at least you get an idea of what we did and you can do it yourself in a prettier, brighter room!