Herringbone Rope

Usually, I'm not much of a fan of making beaded ropes, I find them repetitive and quite dull if I'm being really honest.  But recently, I've been rather under the weather and the meditative, repetitive action of making a simple beaded rope has been quite welcome.

Instead of making one long piece of rope, I worked on a project from the Bead & Button Stitch Workshop book on Herringbone.  The project I chose was the Link to Creativity Necklace by Shirley Lim.

It's quite an exercise in colour (and patience), choosing the right shades of beads to blend from one colour to the next.

Because I like numbers - I freely admit I'm a bit of a geek, I decided to work out how long a piece of herringbone rope I would have made, if all the little segments were joined together.  There are 32 segments of rope in this necklace, each about 11cm long... which in total gives about a 3.5m rope; so if it was all lined up end to end, it would be about twice as long as I am tall Another thing I realised as part of making this project is that I used a whole reel of One-G thread in it (plus a bit more).  The only other project I've used more than one reel of thread on is the handbag I made for my wedding.

There is one thing I changed from the pattern, and this was how I made the clasp - it's still a beaded toggle clasp, but I attached it in a different way that looked a little sturdier.  All in all, I'm really pleased with how it came out.

So, here are the photos I took of the finished thing!