I had some time yesterday, and more beads that I hadn’t used, and came up with another two bracelets.
They turned out to be challenging to photograph. They’re barely showing up against a white background, but against anything darker, it was almost impossible to tell they had any color to them at all.
The bracelet on the left is made of rose quartz and silver tone spacer beads. This started life as a bracelet of all rose quartz, bought with that all amethyst bracelet. I could wish the beads were a deeper shade of pink, but this may be why the original bracelet was so inexpensive!
The bracelet on the right has morganite beads (I think—the string wasn’t labeled) and rose gold tone spacer beads.
Bracelet #1 6 mm rose quartz beads, 3 mm silver tone spacer beads, 1 mm clear stretch cord
Bracelet #2 5 mm morganite (?) beads, 3 mm rose tone spacer beads, 0.7 mm clear stretch cord
A month or so before the pandemic, I was buying beads and findings. Although it would make a good story if I’d had a premonition that I might need to keep myself occupied for a while, the reality was that I’d wandered down the “wrong” aisle at Michaels, seen some pretty beads, remembered that I liked to make bead jewelry, and took advantage of some sales. Still, it was good timing: I went into Minnesota’s stay-at-home order not only with my usual bursting-at-the-seams yarn stash, but a respectable hoard of beads.
Bracelet #1: I wasn’t terribly creative at first. I started off by redoing things I already owned: resized a couple of bracelets, restrung a necklace…that sort of thing. The first piece of new jewelry was a bracelet I made pretty much by transferring most of the beads from a string I’d purchased straight onto some stretch cord and tying a knot in it. Unfortunately, I’m a lot more practiced at keeping good notes for knitting and crochet, and I didn’t record what this stone is. I think it’s beryl, but I’m not going to swear to that.
After that, the beading supplies sat untouched while I threw my energies first into knitting, crochet, and working from home, and then into resurrecting my sewing skills—and my sewing machine—to make masks. I finally found myself in the mood to play with beads yesterday afternoon. Even then, I was only going to repair another bracelet: amethyst beads on a stretch cord that I’d accidentally cut. Maybe 15 minutes, tops, to restring it, and probably less. But while digging the reel of stretch cord out of my box of the beading supplies, I got distracted.
Bracelet #2: I found the stretch cord. I also found a string of iridescent glass beads. With beads with this much sparkle to them, there was no need to get fancy. I was going to just put them on a stretch cord and leave it at that, but then I tried alternating the glass beads with silver spacer beads. It’s a subtle difference, but even though the silver beads are practically unnoticeable, they set the glass beads off wonderfully.
Bracelet #3: Now that I’d found my cache of silver spacer beads, I finally had an idea of what to do with these nifty purple/pink beads I’d gotten. Since the beads were opaque, I used beading wire for durability. The clasp is magnetic. I’m hoping it’s strong enough to hold the bracelet on through everyday wear, since it makes the bracelet so easy to put on with one hand. But if not, I’ll just switch it out for a lobster claw or something.
Bracelet #4: After the two bracelets and restringing a necklace, I finally got around to the amethyst bracelet I’d intended to work on from the start. After the other two, a bracelet of just amethyst beads seemed a mite boring. So I took out a few of the amethyst beads and added some antiqued silver beads. Much better.
Earrings: Practically an afterthought. I was trying to organize the beading supplies and get a better idea of what I had. While doing so, I found some amazonite beads left over from a previous project, some silver heishi beads (ditto), some silver pins (ditto ditto), some silver earring posts/backs…and, well, I can always find an outfit to wear simple earrings with.
Bracelet #1 6 mm beryl (?) beads, 0.7 mm clear stretch cord.
Bracelet #2 6 mm iridescent glass beads, 3 mm silver plated spacer beads, 0.7 mm clear stretch cord
Bracelet #3 8 mm purple dyed shell beads, 8 mm purple glass luster beads, 3 mm silver-tone spacer beads, 0.018 inch (0.46 mm) bead stringing wire, magnetic clasp
Bracelet #4 6 mm amethyst beads, 4 mm x 5 mm antiqued silver rice beads, 1 mm clear stretch cord
Earrings 8 mm amazonite beads, 3 mm antiqued silver beaded heishi beads, 3 mm silver jump rings, silver posts
While the knitting putters along (the front and back of the Wedge Pullover are blocking as I write this), I made another detour into beading. This is the Bali Rope Bracelet, the last of my purchases from when my local bead store closed this spring. While beading is much faster than knitting or crochet, I thought this would take a while. I pictured having to do some sort of complicated threading or weaving to get many small silver beads to form that rope pattern. In fact, I’ve been putting off tackling the project because I figured it was going to be a major investment of effort (by beading standards).
Bali Rope Bracelet.
No, it’s a trick. Those aren’t tiny round beads woven together, but a lot of heishi beads lined up in a row. Each bead naturally nestles at a 45º angle to the one next to it, creating the illusion that you’ve made a thick silver cord. Seven Swarovski crystals add color and sparkle. I had to shorten the bracelet by about an inch to fit my wrist, but then, that’s easy to do when you’re custom-making the bracelet. Oh, and the entire project, start to finish, was about 40 minutes. Now to find an outfit to wear my new pretty sparkly thing with.
What I did not find after searching for my silver posts:
A supply of silver posts.
What I did find:
A supply of gold posts. File this under What was I thinking? since I almost never wear gold jewelry.
A supply of gold French hooks. (See above.)
A supply of surgical steel French hooks. Potentially useful for future projects, but not what I need at the moment.
A supply of 2″ thin head nickel pins. I could get lots of earrings out of these.
Miscellaneous beads left over from projects I barely remember.
A knitting noddy. I actually own one of these?
Three afghan hooks, sizes G, H, and I. Good timing: Tunisian crochet is becoming popular again.
A set of size 6 8″ Aero Bernat double-pointed needles.
A crochet hook so large that I think it might be size Q. I owned a size Q hook once, didn’t I? Not that the manufacturer marked it in any useful way.
Several counted cross stitch UFOs. [wince]
A length of a lovely blue plaid flannel. I bet I meant to make a shirt out of this.
And a pair of earrings I’d been planning to get rid of, with silver posts that could be cannibalized for another project. Like, say, amethyst earrings:
One of our local bead stores closed the branch closest to me earlier this year. I don’t bead much, but I had filled one of their loyalty cards, so I made a last trip to use it. Once I got my loot home, though, I put it away and promptly forgot about it. Oops. But over the past couple of weeks, I’ve wanted to wear the earrings I intended to make with some of the beads I bought, and I finally made time to work on them this morning.
Fluorite, fluorite, and more fluorite.
Simple beading continues to be a great instant gratification craft. There isn’t much I can knit in half an hour or so, much less knit three versions of it. Nor will these require washing or blocking afterwards, although since the findings are silver, I’ll have to polish them occasionally.
As the caption says, all three pairs are fluorite beads. It may not show well in the picture, but the leftmost pair are a lavender so pale that they may pass as colorless, the center pair are green with a purple stripe—like certain hand knit socks, they’re fraternal twins, not identical—and the pair on the right are a more-or-less uniform pale green.
I did bring home more beads than that, of course. For instance, there’s a pair of amethyst beads ready to become a pair of truly purple earrings once I remember where I stored my silver posts. (See, you can tell this isn’t my major hobby because I don’t know where something that basic is. Trust me, I know where my knitting supplies are. Most of them, anyway.) But I’m happy to wait until the mood strikes again to tackle those future projects—or until I find those posts.
While I was doing my level best to feed my knitting habit while not making any sweaters, I ended up knitting a series of smaller projects. This is the Harmonia’s Rings Cowl made from Malabrigo Merino Worsted (the color is Forest). I was delighted to finally have something I wanted to make that I could use a Malabrigo yarn for. I love the feel of the yarn, but I haven’t trusted it to hold up with heavy use. But surely a cowl won’t be subject to much friction.
Harmonia's Rings Cowl
This project has a slightly more distinguished pedigree in my personal history than most projects I tackle. The first time I ever saw it was when Cat Bordhi was wearing it at a Yarnover a few years ago. So yes, the HRC is based on the Möbius strip. Unlike my last Möbius scarf, this time I didn’t get too many twists into the cast-on (yay!). You work the HRC from the top down. It starts out as a bit of Möbius knitting while you build up the bit around the neck. You then “break” the Möbius strip and rejoin, now working in the round like usual, increasing at intervals to allow it to spill down over the shoulders.
A close-up of the beaded picot edge.
This is the first time I’ve done any beaded knitting. The top edge of the HRC is a line of beaded picots. The pattern says to use seed beads and a size 14 crochet hook to get them on the yarn. No, I wasn’t foresighted enough to have a size 14 crochet hook on hand when I reached the picots. I did have a size 10 hook which was small enough to fit through the beads, but it was too large to pull the yarn back through. My solution was to loop a length of dental floss around the yarn. I pulled the dental floss through the bead with the size 10 hook and then pulled on the floss to bring the yarn itself through.
It’s been working pretty well as a cowl. The designer says that you can pull it up over your head, but I think my neck is too long or something since when I tried that, it felt strained and awkward. It’s quite warm and the wool is soft enough not to bother me when it touches bare skin. And I really like the design itself. It hugs the neck so that cold air doesn’t get in, and since it’s not one of those loose, drapey cowls, it doesn’t dangle in my way when I lean forward. Now if I could just suppress my urge to get it all straightened out—impossible where a Möbius is concerned!
I made it back to the bead store for the first time this year. (Do beaders refer to their local bead store as an LBS the way knitters and crocheters call their local yarn store an LYS?) I left with only one kit, not so much because I was practicing self-restraint as because they’ve only created a few new kits since I decimated their stock last year and only one of the new batch was one I was interested in. This kit, Santa Fe, makes a necklace that can also be worn as a bracelet (or perhaps it’s a bracelet that can also work as a necklace). It’s not my normal style of jewelry, but I liked the colorway (Spring; they also sell a reddish-golden colorway called Autumn) and there was just something about the scatteredness of it that appealed to me.
Santa Fe necklace, single strand
Assembling this kit was a different challenge for me than I usually find with beading projects. Technically, it wasn’t difficult: thread the included beads onto the beading wire, making sure that the charms fall at certain points so that they’ll hang in the proper places when it’s worn as a necklace, then attach the lobster clasp and jump ring. Where I was challenged was in the very scatteredness that had attracted me to it in the first place. The designers figure you’ll use the photo of their sample just to give yourself ideas on how to mix the beads and that your creativity will spill out as you play with it.
Santa Fe necklace, double strand. Note how now the charms are centered relative to the clasp.
I’m quite willing to believe that other people are blessed with inspiration when given suggestions like that. Me, I have an addiction to symmetry. Left up to my own devices, this necklace was going to be mostly symmetrical, only not quite, because the beads weren’t going to come out right, and the whole effect was going to disappoint me. So I ended up following the sample photo slavishly. I’d say there’s about 99% similarity between them. I am inordinately proud of the one bead I put in on impulse. But overall, I’m happy with the results, which leaves me wondering which is “better,” to basically copy the original and enjoy the necklace, or go off on my own and end up beating myself up for not being naturally random.
Santa Fe necklace as bracelet (5 wraps)
Oh, and after all that fuss, I’ll probably end up wearing as a necklace more than a bracelet, even though when I bought the kit, I thought it would be the other way around. With actual wear, some loops become loose, others tighten up, and I’m worried that I’ll snag it on something and break it. But I do have ideas for a future one . . . that is, one that I come up with on my own, and have to be all asymmetrical and randomish with by myself!
As the year winds down, I’m finishing off the beading projects. This is the last of the beading kits I bought this summer, the Rock Fall Necklace. It was pretty simple to assemble, making it a great project for filling in a bit of the time before Thanksgiving really got going.
As usual, the instructions didn’t name the stones involved, so I got to play Guess the Crystal again. I think the white, flat bead on the left is mother-of-pearl and I’m certain the teardrop-shaped one in the center is rose quartz. That leaves the round bead on the right, and I have no clue as to what it might be. I get why the instructions never list the stones, since the same instructions are used for a variety of colorways which use different stones, but it’s still a mite frustrating.
Anyway, assembling the necklace was quick, especially as this time I had all the parts promised. After working my way through the Palisades Necklace, I’ve had plenty of practice twisting eyepins into loops, and that went much better this time—the loops were round when I finished, not strangely flattened ovals! Use jump rings to connect the beads to the bigger ring, string a leather cord through the ring, slide a bead down to decorate the knot and add fasteners to the cord. Now I just need to let the necklace hang for a bit to get the kinks out of the leather cord (the beads and all are so light that their weight alone isn’t instantly pulling the leather straight).
Okay, the bead store now has an entire winter to come up with new bead kits that I’d like to make. [drums fingers] You’re working on this, people, right? Right?
Today was the first day after Daylight Savings Time ended for the year, and having the sun set an hour earlier cut into my beading time just as I suspected it would. I figured I’d better press ahead with another beading kit while there was still some light to work by. This time around, I chose to work on the Palisades Necklace. It looks fairly simple, but it ended up taking longer than I expected to complete.
The construction of the necklace is fairly straightforward: thread an eyepin through each bead and cut and bend it to form a second loop. Then use bits of chain to link the beads together. However, it takes time to bend nineteen eyepins. And those links of chain came as a single strand that had to be cut apart oh so carefully, lest you clip the wrong link and ruin a section. I dropped one section and nearly didn’t find it again—eek! This project did end up using all the beading tools I’d bought, so now I feel justified in having bought them! The one drawback to the project was that before I knew it, most of the (now shorter) afternoon had passed. So much for getting anything else done today.
I believe the beads are fluorite, although again, there’s nothing in the kit to identify them. It’s going to be a bit of a challenge to find a sweater that can set off all those shades, from almost white to deepest purple.
Overall, I’m really having fun putting these bead kits together. I almost never knit or crochet from kits, but it’s different for beading somehow (probably has something to do with the fact that compared to my knitting/crocheting experience, I’m a beading novice). But there’s this one little problem with the bead kits: more often than not, a bead is missing or deformed or something. I understand that the bead store employees are probably putting these together by hand and I’m sure they blur after a while, but I seem to have an uncanny talent for buying the one kit out of several available in which all is not as it should be. And being a beading novice, it throws me, whereas when something goes wrong in knitting, I have enough experience to work my way past it.
Well, I worked my way past this kit’s problem, although it was less my growing experience and more my growing stash of leftover findings that saved me. The Charmed Life necklace kit is supposed to include two small jump rings, one medium jump ring, and one large jump ring, among other things. My particular kit had one small ring, two medium rings, and no large ring whatsoever. I was able to substitute a medium ring for the missing small ring—since all the charms pile on top of each other, that change won’t be noticeable. And thanks to now having done several projects, I actually have some jump rings in my supplies, one of which I was able to substitute in (barely, because it was almost too big) for the large ring.
And so I present the Charmed Life necklace. It comes in several colorways (do beaders say “colorways”?), but I fell for the purple one. I think the large teardrop bead and the round bead are both amethysts. I know nothing more about the little sparkly crystal than that it’s a little sparkly crystal. And as for what the kit calls a “bezel set crystal,” I can’t tell if it’s also a semi-precious stone, or just a bit of dark purple glass. I think the silver feather makes a nice contrast to all these beads and I hope it doesn’t end up hidden by the teardrop bead all the time. The teardrop worries me a bit. The silver bail you top it with had tiny teeth and I hope they’re strong enough to hold it through normal wear and tear. I mean, you pinch the bail onto the bead with your fingers: that doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence. But right now it’s intact and I’m waiting for the kind of weather where I wear plain sweaters, so that I can try this necklace for real.
Silver Threads 