Water beads - How much to buy?

I'm using water beads too!!!!

You need to fill the fish bowls with water and then measure how much water it took to fill, then multiply time the number of bowls, and then translate to gallon and do the conversion according to the grams of water beads. I used them for my centerpieces and needed almost 500 gallons of them LOL. I bought mine in bulk from rainbowwaterbeads.com

Well go to a hobby store and buy one pack and make one centerpiece first and judge from that one how much you will need.

Thank you ladies, I have 30 centerpieces to do! I think I'm going to use the submerible led lights in the bottom. then I can just put maybe a couple silk flowers in them and be done. simple yet pretty. I hope.

Yeah they sell relatively small quantities at Michael's. Even if they don't have the correct color, you can gauge the amount you'll need.

For one packet- I was able to fill 2 to 2 1/2, 10inch cylinder vases. Add water to some so you get an idea of how much it the beads expand, give it at lease 24hrs!

1 pack can fill up a large table vase half way. Depending on how many you want and your effect you could use about half a pack in each on maybe a little less

@Mrs. Montoya....I am glad you know what you are talking about but i hate math nothing you said made any sense to me. I am just going to estimate on mine ; )

Krista, It boggled me too but I figured it out. It takes 2 cups of water to fill the bowls to where I want them. 2 cups per centerpiece at 30 centerpieces means I need 60 cups. Since there are 16 cups in 1 gallon I would need 3.5 gallons to fill my vases to where I want them. The website says that 100grams makes 2.5 - 3 gallons of beads.

So I would need at least 100grams of beads at the minimum.

@ Jen. Got it..Thanks. You would make a good teacher : )

If you use disttilled water the beads are bigger i used them but it depends on how full you want so buy one pack and see

That's why I love this site..... you always learn so much and someone else is always using the same things that you are..... I never would have thought of using distilled water would have caused them to get bigger..... Thanks for that tidbit. I'll have to give that a try.

*random alert* swear this post said "water beds" and my first response was "0?" lol

Thank you for the tip on distilled water, it makes sense that soft water with the salt would make it not swell as much! Love these forums.

Heather, I know what you mean! I went back to make sure I spelled it right. Have you seen the T-Mobile commercial with the little pink and white elves? They are singing about 4 G network, but that's not what I hear when they sing - I was like "WHAT?!" LOL

I brought my first pack of line then i went to wal mart and found them for $2 a pack. One pace filled two of my small vase from Ac Moore. The one's from wal mart even got bigger. One trick I did was put them in a old mil container and filled it with water and let it sit over night then the next day I drained the water off just to see how bit they were. After that I put fresh water back in the jug and kept it moving. The light are a great buy to check your local stores before you buy them.

I'm planning to use crystal water beads too as my centerpiece for my upcoming wedding. I saw from a site that 1 pack makes 3 cups of hydrated beads. They are offering 1lb of non-hydrated beads for around $20 and they said it is consists of 90 packs. So I guess that makes 270 cups of beads. I think 3lbs of it can complete the look of my wedding already. dainty

Yay!!! my friend introduced me to water beads this weekend!! A little goes a long way... and they last for a long time.. i still have a big bowl full of nice big beads!!

I have 4 bags of 2 pound of waterbeds. Does the water go by quarts or gallons? And how much would I need? To have soak in water, I need them to be the big normal size

I have four small, medium, large cylinder vase each in I want to make floating pearls with the water beads. I'm not sure how many to buy.