Baroque Cube Earrings tutorial

Itty bitty beaded cubes to hang from your ears. 

Make your own. 

https://www.etsy.com/listing/250952884/

Pentacluster Beaded Bead in Live Coral

I always enjoy playing with Pantone’s color combinations. Here is their 2019 Color of the Year, Live Coral, featured in the colors combo called Coral Woman by hep svadja. It’s not exact, but just my interpretation.

Find this Pentacluster Beaded Bead.
Learn to make your own Cluster Beads.

Victory Pod Earrings in Red Black Silver

These beaded earrings feature Victory Pods. They are woven with platinum plated seed beads, and glass seed beads in red, black and silver. The wire is sterling silver.

 These are medium sized earrings. The pods are hollow, which makes them light for their size.

Width is 21 mm (less than 1 inch).
Length of earrings from top of ear wire is 48 mm (1 7/8 inches).

If you would like to learn to make your own Victory Pod Earrings, I have a tutorial available here in my Etsy shop: https://www.etsy.com/listing/258021406/

Strand of Purple Beaded Beads

Here's a strand of purple beaded beads with lampwork glass, simply strung on silk cord.

The beaded bead designs include Octahedral Clusters, Nuts and Washers, and Infinity Beads.

 

This strand is sold.  Here's a photo of my dog asking for breakfast.

Thanks for looking.

Something Old Is New Again

When I opened up the file to update it, I saw why I haven't been selling the tutorial for the Seven Sisters Pendant in quite a while. This was one of my earliest bead weaving designs, and I wrote the tutorial before I figured out how to write a tutorial very well. The only thing that was salvageable was the illustrations and some of the photos. I rewrote pretty much all of the text and shot a whole new sequence of step photos. Plus, I added lots of tips so that your pendant will turn out pretty, and increased the gallery with new photos of beadwork.

y section. Anyway, here's a link to the new, and much improved version of the tutorial.

Flu Virus DNA Beaded Earrings

I got a request for some more DNA beaded earrings. So I whipped up a few new pairs for the occasion.  The gent requested something from a Flu virus, so I had a look around the web and found a data base at National Center for Biotechnology Information which has a data base on the Influenza virus. There you can download genetic code sequences. (It's truly amazing what genetic scientists have accomplished in my lifetime!)

Green gold Earrings: The coloring of the base pairs uses the first ten base pairs in the sequence from the H1N2 Influenza A virus from Berkeley in 1968. The specific base pair sequence shown in each earrings is
GCTTG GAGAA
CGAAC CTCTT

Pink Gray Earrings (for sale): The coloring of the base pairs uses the first ten base pairs in the sequence from the H1N1 Influenza A virus from NY in 2001. The base pair sequence shown in each earrings is, specifically,
AGCGC GAAAG
TCGCG CTTTC

Blue Earrings (for sale): This pair doesn't have the flu. Instead, it's one of my old favorites. The coloring of the base pairs uses the sequence recognized by the enzyme SbfI, which is found in the microorganism Streptomyces sp. BF-61. Streptomyces is the largest antibiotic producing genus of bacteria, producing antibacterial, antifungal, anti-parasitic drugs. The specific base pair sequence shown in each earrings is a palindrome, specifically,
CCTGCAGG
GGACGTCC

 

I have written a lot about beaded DNA on my blog if you would like to learn more.
Thanks for looking.

Solstice Earrings Beaded with Prismatic Right Angle Weave PRAW

I made some new earrings.

You can learn more about each pair by clicking on the photos. You can also learn to make your own with my tutorial for Solstice Earrings.

Thanks for looking.

Penrose Tile Beading with Garden Weave

I released a new tutorial this month on Garden Weave.

Garden Weave is a flat beaded angle weave like right angle weave (RAW). This tutorial explains the basics technique of beading and designing with Garden Weave and gives detailed instructions for this pair of easy earrings and a pendant.

Here they are in orange. Super fun! Garden weave is a fun way to explore color combinations with nothing more than seed beads and thread.

The tutorial includes many, many different samples of beadwork and charts that explain their structure. Charts for two different repeating patterns are included so you can let your imagination run wild to make bracelets and design other elaborate pieces with Garden Weave, including the chart for this pendant.

For an extra challenge, the tutorial includes charts and a beaded pendant using Penrose tiles, including this one.

After completing the tutorial, I beaded this large patch of a Penrose tiling with Garden Weave using the techniques I explain in the tutorial.

 Here you can see how big it is.

I'm not sure yet what I'll do with it, but here's a detail.

 

And another!

 Thanks for looking!

Truncated Icosidodecahedron in Beads Crater Moon Beaded Bead

Meet Crater Moon.

and Crater Moon in White...

Each Crater Moon is composed of nearly 2700 beads.

The American Mathematical Society recently posted a photo of an amazing structure on their Facebook page with no comment of who made it. They called it a rhombicosidodecahedron (3.4.5.4) because that is the name of the polyhedron in the very inside layer, but Susan Goldstine noticed that the outside layer is actually a truncated icosadodecahedron (4.6.10). This object is a multilayered compound of unusual polyhedra.

With help from Susan, I figured out how to weave it with seed beads and thread. Susan built this model below using Zometool, and wrote, "This is what the structure above each triangular face of the rhombicosadodecahedron looks like. I feel better about not being able to make out what's going on from the original photo. The cavity has a triangle, six trapezoids, three pentagons, and the hexagon at the top." Furthermore, "Above each core pentagon is half an icosidodecahedron (3.5.3.5)."

To bead it, I used an edge-and-cover weave with 3 mm bugle beads for the edge beads and size 11° seed beads for the cover beads. (There's one exception, where I used 11° seed beads for the short edge beads under the squares.) In other words, every n-gon has 2n beads, including n edge beads alternated with n cover beads, all sewn in a loop.

Here you can see how I started to weave the inside layer, showing the edge-and-cover weave for (3.4.5.4), also known as the rhombicosadodecahedron as I mentioned above.

This is a photo from Ivona Suchmannova of Spiral Beading, showing the first layer curled into a ball.

This is the complete first layer of Crater Moon with 6 mm bugle beads and 11º seed beads. This piece will finish a lot larger than the others because the bugle beads are longer.

Here is the start of the second layer on Ivona's bead. She stitched loops of triangles around the pentagons, connected by at the bugle beads.

This shows the start of layer 2 with the longer, 6 mm bugles. You can see the 5 triangles around the pentagons and the 3 trapezoids around the triangles. The short edge of the trapezoids is the aqua 8°. All other beads are 11° and 6 mm.

 

Next, the center front is still just one layer, 

but layer 2 is nearly complete.  Layer 2 

consists of 30 little 3D pentahedrons sitting 

on top of the squares in the first layer. Four 

little walls like a camping tent, the four other 

sides of the pentahedrons include two 

triangles and two trapezoids. The short sides 

of the trapezoids are the one place where 

we use an 11° instead of a bugle bead.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These show the second layer finished. The seed beads in the center of the Xs (aqua below, burgundy above) are the tops of the tents, the one place I used seed beads for edge beads.

This is the start of the third layer. It's triangles and pentagons. Here are the pentagons.

And here you can see both pentagons and triangles.

You can add the pentagons and triangle in two steps, or you can stitch them together.
Here you see 3 of the 12 rings done.

Four more to go!

 Here all 12 are done.

In the fourth layer, I finished the space under the 30 squares, adding two trapezoid loops per square.

The fifth and final layer requires adding 720 size 15° seed beads to the outer surface.  Only then does the Crater Moon really hold its shape neatly.

You should make one.

It's just 11°, 15°, Toho 3 mm bugles, and Fireline 6lb.

And a whole lot of stitches.

Here you can see how big it is, just 1.75 inches across or 45 mm.

If you would like to have your very own Crater Moon, you can find the white one in my Etsy shop here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/579082293/

The larger Crater Moon is available here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/582628369/

Thanks for looking.

P.S. If you'd like to try weaving beads, but you think that the Crater Moon is a little beyond your skill set, have a look in my Etsy shop for tons of other tutorials for all skill levels.