Tutorial for Beaded Cascade Earrings

New beading tutorial! Finally!

I call them Cascade Earrings. They’re for those of us who like itty bitty seed beads.

Find it here:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/1446919002/

Baroque Cube Earrings tutorial

Itty bitty beaded cubes to hang from your ears. 

Make your own. 

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

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/

Cellini Asterisk Pendant in Czech Etched Seed Beads

This Cellini Asterisk is a beaded pendant, woven from hundreds of glass seed beads in the colors silver, burgundy, and metallic pink. Many of the beads are the new Czech etched beads that shimmer and twinkle in the light. This ornate cluster is composed somewhere between 1200 and 1500 beads, too many to count. The beadwork is hollow, making it light for its size.

This pendant is 6 cm (2 and 3/8 inches) from point to point and 16 mm thick, suitable for a focal bead on a necklace. The hole is the center is 7 mm wide. It looks a bit like a five-legged spider from the back side.

If you would like to learn how to make your own Cellini Asterisk, I have a tutorial available here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/261775731/tutorial-cellini-asterisk-pendant-beaded.

Thanks for looking.

Cellini Flower made with peyote stitch

Here is the newest piece off of my beading needles, a Cellini Flower made with several different metallic seed beads including the new Czech etched ones that shimmer and twinkle in the light. If you haven't tried the new etched beads, I really recommend them.  I have them in a few colors, and I'm totally in love.

Find this flower here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/552902817/
Find the tutorial here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/255173329/

Fairy Chrysalis Tutorial and Bead Soup Sale

I recently updated an old tutorial on free form beaded pendants.  Ten years ago, I wrote instructions to show how to stitch a Fairy Chrysalis, a pendant designed to look organic and constructed from a wide variety of beads. You can read all about the tutorial here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/536288125/tutorial-fairy-chrysalis-beaded-pendant

If you would like a kit to make a Fairy Chrysalis, then you should visit my Etsy shop this Wednesday July 19, 2017at 5 PM Pacific time. I will be having a big sale of kits of bead soup.  I hand selected each lot, and each lot of beads is unique. You can go to Facebook to tons of photos of all of the lots before they go up for sale, with sizes and prices.

Lot #1 has a crazy lace agate with crazy cool banding.  Red and earthy.

 Lot #3 has an amazing piece of orange bumblebee jasper. 

Lot #4 includes a very flashy labradorite.

Which looks really different under different lights.

There are lots more lots. To see the rest of the lots that I will have for sale on Wednesday, see this gallery on the Bead Infinitum fan page on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pg/beadinfinitum/photos/?tab=album&album_id=1516325788427996

Thanks for looking!

Bead Weaving with Wool Felt Sweater Scraps

Did you know that we can apply bead weaving techniques to wool felt?  This weekend I figured out how, and I have to admit, I'm pretty darn excited about it. Here is my first project.  It's a trivet, you know, a hot pad for protecting table tops from hot pots.  It measures 9 inches from top to bottom, and it's 5/8 inches thick.

Here you can see the trivet close up. Let me just say, this technique would make an amazing carpet. This is the texture I want my feet to touch first thing every morning when I get out of bed. Super soft and springy.

Do you want to see how I did it? Here are my materials and tools.  I started with scraps of felted wool sweaters. I used my rotary cutter, ruler and cutting mat to cut a bunch of little strips that are 5/8 inches wide and about 3 inches long.  I made the green strips a little shorter than the yellow strips because the green wool is thicker and I wanted the rolls to finish as the same size, 5/8 inches in diameter. I used polyester "jean stitch" thread and a really thick, long needle to sew the rolls together.  I rolled each strip as I attached it. I stitched this together just as I would bead weave with peyote stitch. Sew right though the side of the jelly roll, through the center and out the other side.

The green scraps were left over from a sweater I made for myself this winter.  I think of it as "The Kelp Queen Sweater." I feel like a sea monster when I wear it, in a good way. It's mostly cashmere and super warm and cozy.

I also made this berry colored sweater recently.  It's in my Etsy shop if you want it.  Again, it's mostly cashmere.  I hand dyed the fabrics before I cut them up and stitched them together. Soft, cozy, warm and berry delicious!

 After finishing this sweater, I had some really nice cashmere scraps that I couldn't part with.  They were too small to make arm warmers, but too nice to throw away. So you can imagine my delight when I found that I could bead weave with them. Here is my set up of tools and materials.  I cut these strips a bit wider than the last set, 3/4 inches.  The strips are long enough to make the rolls 3/4 inches wide.  You'll notice I also added some pliers to my set of tools.  Those are useful for pulling the needle through the many layers of wool.  This technique is a bit hard on the fingers, and the pliers give you super powers, well, practically.

For my second trial of beading with felt rolls, I wanted to make a beaded ball.  With these wonderful strips of cashmere and wool, I beaded an icosahedron. It's the size of a tennis ball. It's very much like a tennis ball, in fact. My local tennis playing friend says it has a similar weight, too, but lighter. Similar squish, but a skosh squishier. It would be a good juggling ball, soft and light but not too light.  I stuffed the small space on the inside full of scraps I made with my scraps. That keeps it nice and solid. You can see how I layered dark and light purple together before making he jelly rolls.  Also, I used my scissors to trim the outside surface to make it smooth, well, smoother than it was. 

In making these two pieces, I found the beaded felt rolls really like to make a flat plane, like the trivet. The amount of curvature in the icosahedron is really pushing how much it the surface wants to curve smoothly before you start to see the sides of the rolls.  Accordingly, this technique will work better for objects with less curvature.  A big felt bowl would be nice, suitable project, I think. The felt should handle that level of curvature nicely.

Anyway, I still have a large garbage bag full of old felted sweaters destined to become new wearable pieces. In that process, I'll make lots more felt scraps. And with those scraps, I might just have to bead weave them into other things like bowls, balls, and boxes. So hopefully there is more bead weaving with felt in my future. Stay tuned. And, as always, thanks for looking. Happy Mother's Day.

Cellini Marquis Pendant

An old friend commissioned me to make a pendant incorporating an old tooth that one of her friends gave her. She had a pretty clear vision of what she wanted, and here's what I came up with. The design of the frame is almost identical to the Cellini Marquis, but I added a few extra rounds to make it bigger.

Boy, you blow up a photo of beadwork, and the mistakes really jump out at you. Fortunately, the missing beads on the bail were fixable. Ahh. All done.

You can find the tutorial for the Cellini Marquis pendant in my Etsy shop.  Thanks for looking.

New Tutorial - Cellini Marquis Pendant

Here is my latest design in my series on Cellini spirals made with peyote stitch and seed beads in different sizes.  With this new tutorial, you can learn to bead weave this Cellini Marquis Pendant.

The beadwork is stitched with just 3 sizes of regular Japanese seed beads. So if you are a bead weaver, you probably already have everything you need. Using just a pinch of each color, this a great way to use up seed beads leftover from other beading projects. No fancy shapes required!

Making the pendant is a suitable project for advanced beginning to intermediate bead weavers who like seed beads. The pendant measure 6 cm high, 7 cm wide, 12 mm thick.

The tutorial is 16 pages, with over 70 full color illustrations and photographs. The tutorial gives highly detailed instructions for every step in the pendant.

Thanks for looking.

Free Pattern Beaded Pussy Hat

Sorry I've been MIA, but... politics.

With all of the craziness that has occurred over the last few months in the US, I have been inspired by politics in a way that I never have been before. The day after the 2017 inauguration, I watched as more than 3 million people protested across the globe for women's rights. In the photos, I saw huge crowds marching for the Women's March on Washington. I saw thousands, maybe tens of thousands of pink pussy hats, all made by hand to honor and draw attention to this event. Being an artist myself, I wanted pay homage to this symbol of women's rights. As a result, I drew this pattern for beaded pussy hats.

The pattern is free for you to use and share as you'd like. Please make lots of beaded pussy hats, give them to your friends. Use them as a reminder to stay involved, and always stand up for women's rights.

These beaded charms are quite little.  As patterned, they are suitable as zipper pulls, earrings, pendants, and bracelet charms. I'd recommend scaling the beads to 11, 8 and 6 to make it bigger for a key ring.
 
On the photo below, the one on the right has stripes. The two on the bottom and left use three colors of beads. Switch colors after each row. If you use a cycle of 2 colors, you get stripes, whereas if you use a cycle of 3 colors, then no two beads of the same color touch each other. There is another 3-cycle in the photo above (far right). You can compare the effect of the relative contrast in color values. Mix dark and light values (previous photo) or mix values of low contrast (photo below).

If you would like to make an origami version of the pussy hat, here is a free tutorial by Beth Johnson.

http://bethjohnsonorigami.com/instructions/ The paper hats here were folded and photographed by Ron Taylor. Notice the bottle cap for scale. Ron folded each of these from 3/4 of a sheet of 3.4 inch memo paper.

Thank you for standing up for women's right. Women's rights are human rights.

New Tutorial - Kali Beaded Pendant and Little Bird Earrings

I'm still playing with new designs using beaded Cellini spirals in peyote stitch.  Now you can learn to bead weave little bird earrings and the Kali pendant with seed beads and thread.

This is Kali. She is a Hindu goddess of time and death.

The beadwork is stitched with just 2 sizes of regular Japanese seed beads. So if you are a bead weaver, you probably already have everything you need. Using just a pinch of each color, this is a great way to use up seed beads leftover from other beading projects. 

Beaded in the colors of fire, you can make a Kali Pendant that looks like a flaming phoenix. 

Making the earrings is a suitable project for advanced beginning bead weavers who like size seed beads, and the pendant is for more advanced bead weavers, first, because there are more steps, and second, because it's a little tricky to assemble the pieces. Both the pendant and earrings scale nicely with bead size.  The beadwork in the photos above use size 15° and 11° seed beads. You can also use size 11° and 8°, which make correspondingly larger pieces of jewelry. The little birds are either 35 mm or 46 mm, depending upon which size seed beads you use. The pendant is either 72 mm or 90 mm across.

I would guess that you could even scale it to use size 8° and 6° with good results, but I haven't tried it yet.  The larger beads are easier to work with, for sure.

The tutorial is 20 pages, with nearly 100 full color illustrations and photographs, a colorful feast for the eyes. The tutorial gives highly detailed illustrations, photographs, charts and written commentary showing how to make the earrings and pendant.

After writing the tutorial, I found a new color scheme for the earrings, the Ruby Slippers, still on the wicked witch.

Thanks for looking.

New Tutorial Space Ship Earrings and Blast Off Bracelet with Crescent Beads

This tutorial explains how to bead weave a bracelet and earrings with Toho’s 2-holed Crescent beads and a variety of seed beads. The Blast Off Bracelet is solid and somewhat flexible. The cable is round and measures one centimeter thick. It’s stitched lengthwise, making easy to add units for a perfect fit.

This tutorial includes step-by-step instructions for weaving Space Ship Earrings and the matching Blast Off Bracelet. The designs include loops of seed beads that make for simple and elegant way to attach jump rings and clasps. Use your purchased clasp or stitch a toggle bar with seed beads to finish the bracelet.

This tutorial is designed for advanced beginning bead weavers. If you know how to use the basic tools of beadweaving (needle, scissors, bead mat), you are ready to follow this very detailed tutorial.

With ear wires the earrings measure about an inch and a half (38 mm) long.
Beaded bracelet measures 1 cm thick.
The tutorial is very detailed, 13 colorful pages, with over 77 full color illustrations and photographs. The tutorial gives highly detailed illustrations, photographs, and written instructions to make the earrings and bracelet.

Gothic Cross and Trident Pendants Beaded with Peyote Stitch

I came up with a pointed finial design, and when I put four of them together, they made a perfect cross.  I think the style is classically Gothic. So that's what I named it. The tutorial explain how to weave seed beads into both crosses and tridents.

To inspire you to learn the techniques and make them your own, a page of illustrations includes other designs using the techniques this pattern describes.

These pendants feature the new Toho Demi Round Beads. Just add 2 sizes of regular seed beads, round beads, and an optional rivioli. The difficulty level is suitable for intermediate bead weavers who like tubular peyote stitch with step ups. If you know what that means, you can probably pick up 10 grams of Demi Round 11° and start beading from your stash.

The tutorial is 17 pages, with over 115 full color illustrations and photographs. The tutorial gives highly detailed instructions for every step in making the two pendants.  Thanks for looking.

Tila Icosahedron Beaded Beads Necklace with Nuts and Washers in Blues with Lampwork Glass

For this whimsical necklace, I made 6 beaded beads, including 4 Nuts and Washers and a Tila Icosahedron and an Octahedral Cluster. Then, I added 5 borosilicate and lampwork glass beads torched by 5 different artists. Together they make a pallet of blues and silvery greens. This is an unusual and strand of beads, eclectic yet harmonious, and never to be repeated.

They're all strung on a 26 inch piece of silk and cotton cord, that I twisted and plied on my spinning wheel in colors that match the beads. I tied sliding knots so you can adjust the necklace to wear it long or short. Alternately, You could use this set as a beginning of a more elaborate necklace, but I would wear them just as they are, strung on cord.

 Includes 4 inches (10 cm) of beads. Largest beaded bead (the doughnut) measures an inch (25 mm).

Thanks for looking!