"We wore the necklaces, but we also sometimes broke them apart and melted the beads into different shapes that we used to make pins, earrings, toys, or oddly shaped, multi-colored things that had no real purpose. Mostly we just liked melting the beads, which we could do in my mother's oven or in my Easy-Bake oven. Sometimes we cut up the strings of beads and made them into necklaces or bracelets for our dolls. We drilled holes in the doubloons and made earrings or pins out of them too. Or we put them in one of the plastic pages of the books that housed our doubloon collections. We saved the best necklaces, the longest ones with the beads that looked like shiny, colored pearls, to wear as part of our costumes the next year."