Bead Techniques

There are a variety of ways to put together glass seed beads. You can weave them on a loom (of course, on a Mirrix Loom, www.mirrixlooms.com) or you can sew them together using a variety of stitches. This is called off-loom weaving, although there is actually no weaving involved.

What's fascinating about these little beads is the way they join together to create a piece of jewelry or a piece of fabric. They have a special quality that no other material has: they are hard and they have holes.

In joining together these beads your thread moves through one bead and into another, somehow circling the beads so that they join together (versus just stringing them which will not allow you to create something wider than one bead). And as these beads join together they interact with one another. Not only do you have the interaction of bead colors, but you can also combine different shapes and sizes.

I used to think there would be great limitations in bead work. It turns out if I live my full nine lives, I will never experience those limitations.

New Designs

Maybe the best thing about using beads to create jewelry is my work is constantly evolving. Sometimes the evolution is an improvement on a previous idea; sometimes it's a leap into entirely new waters. The new work does not negate the old work, it just gives me a direction to in so that I can be excited about the work I am making.

I also love to play with new materials. I have a tendency to be attracted to a very certain kind of bead. Why am I never surprised that the beads I am most attracted to are the most expensive. There is a reason for this. The finishes on the beads I consider the most beautiful are attained by using precious metals which can include gold, silver, palladium, rhodium. Actually, the rhodium plated beads have now been discontinued because rhodium now costs $1,800 an ounce. That plating has been replaced by palladium which costs $1,255 an ounce. Compare that to gold which is $960 an ounce or silver which is $15 an ounce. Because I am so in love with rhodium (it's that silver colored bead in above photo, but the particular bead I use reflects all the colors of the rainbow much as a diamond would), because I knew it was going to be discontinued, I bought a kilo of rhodium plated Delica beads. I've got a pretty good stash and I use these beads liberally. In the past, if I loved a bead, I would hoard it, afraid to use it because then, well, I wouldn't have it. Now I just use the beads I love and give away the ones I don't. I take such great pleasure in looking at the beads I love as I turn them into pieces for you to wear, that it makes the extra expense worth it. Therefore, I have this amazing collection of all my favorite beads. I add to the collection slowly because by now I've bought just about every little glass bead there is that I want to work with. What a thrill to find a new bead, but unfortunately that doesn't happen much anymore.

The most important aspect of working with seed beads is to understand color relationships among the beads. You can envision a perfectly lovely design and then destroy it with the wrong beads. It's as easy to ruin and design as it is to make it work. I cannot tell you how many pieces I have cut up (and yes, I meticulously resort all the beads and use them again . . . this is a great thing to do when my imagination is asleep) because they annoyed me, the colors were wrong, something just did not click. It's almost painful to work on a piece that is failing and it's the kind of thing that nags at you constantly until you finally give in and say: okay so I've worked on this piece for ten hours and there is something wrong with it but I still can't live with it . . . here comes the trusty scissors.

That can be such a relief. If I didn't love making this jewelry for you I certainly wouldn't bother considering that each piece is often not just born as is. It often has lived another life.

To the left, the second bracelet in the series. Again, lots of rhodium and gold plated beads. I enjoyed the pearl flourish at the end to balance the simple lines of the piece and to off-set the silver button. You can see the rainbow effect in the beads.

Now to get back to work. I have this great idea for a bracelet.

A Little Universe of Beads

I became fascinated by beads not by design or choice. I had recently gone into business manufacturing and selling the Mirrix Loom (http://www.mirrixlooms.com/), a high-end portable metal tapestry loom. The loom was beautiful. All was good with the world. The loom was beginning to sell. I was totally emerged in the world of fiber: dyeing it, spinning it, weaving it. And then one day I had this revelation that maybe the Mirrix Loom could also be the world's best bead loom. A little tinkering here and there and it became both: a tapestry loom and a bead loom. The only problem was: I personally had no interest in beads. I had tried weaving with them a few times on junky little looms. I found the whole process rather tedious. The beads were too small and rolled around a lot eluding capture. The vast range of colors and finishes was just beginning to emerge in full but I had limited knowledge of the possible resourses. And it annoyed me that I couldn't create the bead colors myself the way I had been able to do with fiber (where I actually dyed and mixed fiber colors before spinning). I just thought the whole bead thing was rather boring.

And then something happened. I am not sure what. Maybe it was discovering the enormous range of beads from sizes and shapes to colors and finishes. It wasn't endless, but it sure was huge. I started really looking at the beads. I began to discover what beads I loved and I began buying them slowly at first. It was a huge learning curve which I had survived in the fiber world (having to teach myself all about dyeing and spinning for tapestry because it wasn't exactly a ubiquitous past time shared by many). The more I got into the curve, the more interested I became. Evenutally, I was becoming fluent about beads. I knew the different brands and how they were different and even sometimes why they were different. I was aware of most of the possible shapes and where to get the ones I liked. I began to understand the numbering systems both for colors and for sizes. Oh, and I was learning where to get the bead colors and finishes that most appealed to me. Knowing what I liked with so much to choose from was the best gift of all. I could then search for those particular beads. The hunt for something like that is always fun. I also began to understand semi-precious stones and silver and what threads accomplished what tasks.

I wove some beaded tapestries:

To the right is a plate of pears and peaches. I put the beads in piles like little pots of paints with the photograph behind the threads on the loom. And I played.

I made felt purses and embroidered beads onto the purses (and hands and spirals!). I was on a mission. I was falling for these beads. At some point I realized that beads can be so beautiful alone or in piles or woven or sewn together. They have this habit of making whatever they touch beautiful. Besides, I loved looking at them. I was over the idea that I couldn't like beads. I was in love.

And then one day I did the impossible. I started making jewelry out of beads. Now this seemed impossible at the time because I don't normally wear jewelry. I've since changed my mind about that too because I now have plenty of free jewelry to wear. It was interesting to start thinking in terms of jewelry and not in terms of tapestries. I began thinking about my jewelry as little tapestries, and that's the point at which I understood the path I would take with my jewelry creations.

I've stuck to that path. The same knowledge of color I brought to fiber I have brought to jewelry making. And for me it is all about the color and the color combinations, how they blend and flow and speak to each other. It's about movement and reflection. Gorgeous glass beads allow one to create jewelry that emerges from the strict boundaries of limited colors. And why not adorn oneself with colorful jewelry?

Go back to the top of this post. Look at the beads on the left. Those are triangle beads of a certain finish I fell in love with at the very beginning of my bead journey. I still use that bead in all sorts of shapes and sizes (you are looking at triangle beads) in my jewelry. I love looking at them, at the surprise random colors from roses to golds to greens that appear in that particular bead. I can't even tell you what it is that I love. Maybe it's the feeling I get when I look at them: calm, happy. Just like the feeling I get when I make the jewelry. I hope that feeling never goes away.