I am covering the strofoam with tissues and beads.?

Question

what shoild i use to stick the tissues and beads in the strofaom? (gluesticks, white glue,etc.)

Answer 1

I would use white glue for the tissues and straight pins for the beads

Answer 2

You can use various white glues on "Styrofoam" (polystyrene foam), but some glues will "melt" the foam --either from too much heat or from the chemicals they contain.

White glues (like Elmer's GlueAll**) are fine and they dry clear. The "tacky" white glues should grab and hold better/quicker when you want that, though you'd want to thin down a white glue with water first if you wanted to "decoupage" tissue paper onto the foam (usually using a brush).
Glue sticks wouldn't harm polystyrene foam, but they prob. wouldn't be strong enough for the beads in particular.
(As mentioned, you could just pin the beads in instead of gluing them.)

Another possibility would be a glue gun.
A LOW TEMP glue gun is pefectly fine for the foam, but a HIGH TEMP glue gun gets hotter than that and will melt the foam (the two guns look pretty much alike, and some guns even have a switch so you can change the temperature... I think all the glue gun sticks will work with either temperature/gun though).

If you have only the really-hot type of glue gun though, just let the glue cool a bit before touching it to the foam (you'd have a hard time doing that with *tiny* beads though since you'd probably burn your fingers trying to apply it to the beads to let the glue cool).


**GlueAll is the permanent version of Elmers white glue... there's also their School glue that's washable which you probably don't want.

There are other adhesives and sealers you could use on polystyrene foam, but the adhesives mentioned above are probably the most available and cheapest.


HTH,

Diane B.