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!

Beaded Bowls

Bowls full of beads.... or bowls made of beads.  Either is good  with me!
My slight obsession with beads means that I often buy beads when I don't actually *need* them.  Well, who does actually need beads...???

So, I bought some big tubes of bead soup a while ago, I think I ended up with 6 tubes of 24g of miyuki bead soup - just size 11 beads... nothing fancy, but some gorgeous colours.
Quite often I sit down with some beads with no idea what the finished product will be and just 'doodle' with beads (or beadoodle, as I like to call it).

I didn't have a plan when I started off with this, but I ended up with a bowl, looking rather like this!

It's a little flexible, but holds it's shape nicely, with a rolled-edge at the top for stability.  It measures about 7.5cm across at the top.

The bowl is made using a mixture of peyote, netting and right-angle-weave - it's quite a multi-stitch project, but it has been great fun to make.  So much fun in fact, that I made three!!

I'm not sure they actually have much of a practical purpose, due to the holes in them, they're not massively useful for storing beads... but they are quite handy for putting earrings in at the end of the day.

 The earrings in this little bowl are made using bead quilling techniques - the pinky ones are designed by Kathy King, and the golden ones are my design - published in Bead magazine in December.

I plan to write a tutorial for making these cute little bowls... I'd love to hear what you think about them.

Lime Surprise

As a beader, I've always shied away from fringing.  Don't know why - it's just one of those things that I've been fearful of.   In the last few months, I've got over my fear of it.
Another thing I've never done, is make individual bead embroidery elements and link them together... until now!  
Before Christmas, I bought some gorgeous vintage cabochons from a shop called Rosebudlia; she sells a beautiful selection of cabs and other goodies.  I decided to put these cabs to use for another beading first - joining embroidery elements.

I decided that five elements would look best, and surprisingly, I had the right colours in my stash, so this was quite a stash-buster too!

This is what the finished necklace looked like, and here is me wearing it - so you can see how it sits.

It's just my opinion, but when making a piece like this, involving no metal components in the design, the best way to finish it off is to make a beaded clasp.  I love beaded toggle clasps - and the circular motifs in this lend themselves to a toggle clasp.  

 This shows a close-up of the beautiful cabs I used - they reminded me of ammonites, and the little bits of glitter in them give them a bit of sparkle.

One other slightly odd thing about this piece is that I actually used bugles in it.  Usually I don't use them as they are often sharp at the ends and can cause threads to fray and break, but these matte ones are very nice, and they work well in fringing.

I'd love to hear what you think about this latest piece of beading... I'm very excited about it, and I'm looking forward to using this technique more.