Making Seed Bead Patterns for Making Beaded Jewelry

Making Seed Bead Patterns for Making Beaded Jewelry
Welcome to the Bead Bar in Orlando, Florida. My name is Debra and this morning for Expert Village, I am going to tell you a little bit about the supplies you will need to start a seed beading project. First and foremost, you are going to need a surface to work on. A lot of people like to put their beads in these little trays as this is a ceramic dish. It was actually originally designed for watercolor work but it holds your seed beads, keeps them from rolling all over your table and you can keep them separated into their different color sections so that you are not always hunting for the beads. I would like to pour out just a few of each color that I am going to be working with and that way I don’t have to be going back and forth to my tubes or to my hanks to pickup beads. The key ingredient in putting together a seed bead protégé is a needle and thread. Your needles; you need to be sure you have a specific needle that is made for beading and the reason for that is if you are using a sewing needle you will know that the eye of the needle is wider than the shaft of the needle and the eye very often will not go through a seed bead, so you want to be sure that you get the right seed bead needle to go through your beads. They come in different sizes; size 10 is my favorite because it goes through almost everything and I don’t have to be switching needles back and forth a lot. Size 12 is also a really wonderful size to keep on hand because it goes through even the tiniest seed beads like these size of 15s will go through there beautifully without any problems. Your thread comes on a bobbin just like your sewing thread does. My favorite is called Nymo; it is a nylon single filament thread, it comes on these little bobbins, it also comes in different sizes all the way from Double O, which is a very, very fine thread almost like a hair that I don’t recommend except for embellishing work on up two size F, which is fairly heavy. The ones that you going to use the most are going to be size B and size D. They will work with almost every project and they are very sturdy, easy to use material, when you pull off your thread you want to always give it some a little stretch because the nylon has a little stretch in it and if you don’t pull that out before you start working, you will find that when your project is finished you will have saggy beads because you did not pull the stretch out of your thread. You also, depending on your project, will choose one of two or three conditioning materials. The one you are going to use the most often is called thread heaven. It is a microcrystal product that is wonderful for keeping your threads from tangling and getting in knots which is a major aggravation when you are working with tiny little pieces like this; you don’t want to be going around, picking out knots all the time. You pull your thread through the thread heaven after you put it in your needle and just kind of run your fingers down it, the warmth of your hand will kind of embed the thread haven into the thread and keep your threads nice and manageable. Now if you want stiffness in your project, if you are doing a three-dimensional piece or something that needs to have some body to it, you can use something called a microcrystalline synthetic wax or you can use bees’ wax, which is a natural product. I prefer the microcrystalline products because they don’t get stiff and crack on you overtime like bees’ wax can do. Another really important tool is to have a nice, little, sharp pair of scissors or a little thread nipper because you are going to do a lot of close work, you are going to be snipping your threads down very close to your work and you want something that is tiny but has a very sharp point that can get in close to get those little threads snipped off and this little product right here is one of those wonderful things that you wonder how you ever got along without it. It is a tweezer on one end and a scoop on the other and when you have those beads spills which you are going to have bead spills, it makes life so much easier, it is so easy to clean up your beads by just scooping them up, otherwise you end up trying to pick them up one at a time which can give you major headaches. This is a wonderful tool and then you do get things stuck down in places where you need to get one at a time and so you use the tweezer end on the other end. Those are just a few of the products that you can use to do your seed beading. There are no rules in this other than having fun and we hope that you will dive in there and take a chance on seed beading and make a project of your own.