Making Beads

Hi Everyone 

I’m working on a new Making Project today. This time it’s a beaded/crochet bracelet. The beads will be handmade using polymer clay. I’m taking inspiration from an item of clothing, my sample inspiration is a shirt. I’ve used clothing as inspiration before and find it a very successful way of choosing colours. It can be quite daunting to be faced with a full spectrum of colours ! where do you start ? 

My plan is to take the colours from my shirt ie red, blue, green and white and develop similar polymer clay, similar to the shades of colour in the shirt. I will shape the clay into lots of small beads. At this stage, I’m going for an organic round shape. It’s important that all the beads are as close as possible to the same size. I think, I’ll go for a red thread but this may change ?

The beads will be threaded and crocheted to make my bracelet. I’ve made some initial samples using a range of beads (see my photo story), the idea behind my samples was to explore thread size as well as bead size/shape and check how I could crochet the beads together. I had thought a finer thread would work well (top right image on my photo) but found this is not the case. A thicker material works better. I’m using something referred to as Turkish Flat Crochet.

                   

This crochet technique is very simple but a little practice is needed to get the initial loops nice and tight against the first few beads. As with most yarn/ stringing tasks, the beginning tends to be the tricky point. Once the pattern is established, the crochet technique is very simple. If you can cope with a double crochet, that’s about it. Initially, the crochet can seem complicated but very quickly the pattern becomes intuitive.

I’m planning to develop simple multi colour canes for the beads as well as making some single colour options. The pattern in my shirt will help me create the pattern on my cane. I would like to replicate an element of the organic, square shapes from the shirt into the cane. Not sure how that will turn out but I like the idea ! 

The workshop will be about developing specific clay colour and using the clay to make a unique bracelet, inspired by a piece of clothing. One other thing which is important with the crochet technique is using beads of a similar size and shape, so that will also be a key learning element of the workshop. Techniques for producing a batch size/shape beads will be included.

I’ll share the results of my experiments later this week. Thanks for calling in today.