How to Bead Weave a Decorative Edge Around a Spacer Bead with Loop

SKU VID-0209
Designer: Julie Bean
In this tutorial, see how to bead weave a decorative edge around a daisy spacer bead with loop and turn the design into an earring. You can also adapt this technique to be used with spacer beads without loops. A quick and easy bead weaving project.
Audio Transcript
Note: This audio transcript is auto-generated and may not be completely accurate.
Hi this Julie with Beadaholique.com and today I'm going to show you how to bead weave this little decorative accent which you can then turn into an earring or I'm also going to go ahead and make these into a necklace as well. There's a lot of things you can do with this design and it's really very simple to make quite fun actually you need these little spacer beads that have an extra loop it's a variation on your classic daisy spacer. It just has this little additional loop which is going to make these super easy to connect if you are going to connect them you're going to need some jump rings and then for this particular design I have two colors of size 11/0 delicas and then I've got my needle which has been threaded already with some fire line smoke in size .006 and what that does is if you can look at the finished example you can barely see the thread and that's what you really want to go for, you want the thread to disappear the smoke on this antique copper plate looks really good and it blends right in first off go ahead place your needle all the way through that hole until you have a tail of about six inches take that tail tie a simple knot and then when you're pulling your knot down pull it right up against the loop and go ahead and make a double knot and pull as well we're not gonna cut off this tail because we're going to go back and weave this back in incorporate our thread back into our bead work at the very end so now take your needle you can hold the thread out of the way if that's easiest, tail part put five beads onto your needle. One, Two, Three, Four and five slide them all the way down go from the back side through the middle hole and we're gonna wanna pull our thread. It's going to make a little arc and we want the last bead, the fifth bead, to rest on the junction between the two little decorative metal beaded sections of the daisy bead spacer I'm going back through the fifth bead in the opposite direction and coming out and you see how that's just resting right there and we have our thread bridge which is nice and laying flat so now this time I only need four more beads because this is bead one already put four beads onto my needle slide them down again I'm going from the back side through the front go up through that fifth bead again which will suddenly become the first bead in of my next beaded segment it's almost like you're making petals at this point four more beads from the back to the front you want that fifth bead to rest between the metal beaded nice little metal beads at the decorative edge of the daisy spacer back through it if you need to you want these to form a point so if you need to you can help it along do that all the way to the other edge of our loop almost to the edge, one more final one again four beads slide them down back to front go back through that last bead be careful on this one that your thread doesn't get caught right here on the other side of the loop, you wanna make sure you're able to pull it tight so at this point this is what we've got, now this is actually the first part of the earring and so for this one if you were making that first component you would just tie off your thread at this point and incorporate your tails back into your bead work but I want to show you how to do this other edge to do the other edge. We are going through what was the fifth bead go through the one next to it make sure you're continuously keeping tension nice and tight go through the bead next to it as well now for me this is a little bit easier right handed, I just flipped it around to work going left to right, so now I'm going to add five of my other color and then you'll just the fifth bead in all of these arches are petals or whatever you call them sticks out a little bit you can see that that comes to a point so you want to go through that bead that is on the edge it's sticking out we just made almost like a double petal here. You've got the first row and we got the second row so now we can add another five beads when you start doing a lot of these, these are going to go really fast for you we've got five beads go through the next that middle top bead of the next petal five more if you wanted to, you could do this on the daisy spacer that doesn't have that extra loop just for this design, that's gonna work really well and it would be very easy to connect these but if you want to you could just use another spacer bead I'm going through these middle arch beads, the middle top ones the tension of the thread and just how the beads are and the fact that they we're using an odd number, they're creating the shape on their own I'm not having to do anything special to create this point like petal like shape this is the final one do five more beads go through it go down through these last two beads so conveniently this actually gets us back to our original starting point I have the thread, the tail end that we started with I'm going to tie these two threads together so I'm not removing my needle tie a knot and another one you want to make sure that that knot is secure take my thread that has a needle on it and I'm just gonna go back up through some of my bead work go in any direction you want just make sure that your retracing your original thread path, I wouldn't want to go from here like right over here, you want to make sure that you're not seeing the thread just going back through so what this is doing is it's incorporating your tail but it's also reinforcing your bead work you can do this for as long as you like when you're happy I have a thread zapper here and I'm just going to zap off the edge of the thread close to my beadwork but make sure you don't zap my actual bead work take the needle off of this cut piece of thread thread it onto my tail the original tail I started with now I'm just going to incorporate this thread into my bead work as well the same way now you can retrace the same thread path or you can retrace a different one zap this off so I have this little component now and then if you want to attach two of these together all you need to do is take a jump ring I have little four millimeter jump ring right here we're gonna open it up just like so this is where that little extra loop really comes in handy I'm just going to actually through my bead work this is the center point just gonna go through it there you go close the jump ring careful, you don't wanna accidentally crack a bead or anything so just be patient we have these two which are connected they dangle very nicely, so here's the finished piece again you got this great earring and remember this was just first part, this was step one and then you just did an extra layer to do these more embellished pieces and this project is available on Beadaholique.com under free projects in the earring section. Go to www.beadaholique.com to purchase beading supplies and to get design ideas!

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