...But I Digress....

I had quite a few people asking questions about the beading that I did on the swamp water bottle. So.....I decided to do a short, but by no means detailed tutorial on how to do net beading.

There are lots of places on the net that you can find page after page on how to do different bead work stitches.

I will show you the simplest version and explain how I do it. Each beader has their own method for doing the different stitches.

In this case, I am just doing a couple of rows on a pen as an example.

First, there is the base row. For a beginner to practice, I recommend using contrasting beads to set it up. It is much easier to count the beads if you do. For this one, I did 30 beads. Four gold and then an antique gold, six times. I then went back to the first bead and went through them all again I left a tail of about 5" to have something to tie a knot with. When I had gone around twice, I tied a knot tightly between the beads. Leave the tail. Later you thread it back through some of the beads and cut it off. Some people like to put glue on the knot. That's up to you. I is also up to you how close together your marker beads are placed. If you wanted a smaller net you could cut down the number of gold beads between them.

Now, to start the net work, you take up an odd number of beads on your needle. In this case, I was doing 9 beads total. Four gold, one antique gold and then 4 more of the gold. This makes it easier to find the center bead and also makes a nice accent in the net.

When you get back to the beginning of the row, go through the marker bead and continue on down to the center of the next loop to that marker bead and come out through that one.

That puts you in place to start the next row.

Continue with the pattern as many times as you want. I only did two rows, because I just wanted to demonstrate starting, stitching the rows and fastening off.

When you have the area covered that you want to do, simply start another row, but this time you will go to the number of beads that you started with and pull them up tightly and go around again. Fasten off by starting to go around again but make a few half hitch knots between a few of the beads. Then run it through a bit farther and cut the thread.

I didn't try to make the netting fit the pen, because I was just trying to demonstrate. If you were serious about covering the object, you would start with a divisible number that was closest to fitting tightly around the object in question.

When I did the bottle, I started with just enough to fit around the neck. The next row, I did loops of five beads. To expand around the bottle as it got larger, I did two rows of 7 stitches. Then I did several rows of nine. At this point you ahve to keep pulling it down to see if it fits. You also have to keep the thread fairly tight so that there are no gaps between beads.

On Tessie's bottle, I had to decrease the number of beads as the bottle got smaller at the bottom. I finished it off with three beads between the loops to pull the netting down to the shape of the bottle. Then I went through the last row twice and fastened it off.

I decided that the stopper for the bottle would be OK with just a few beads strung up on wire. That finished it off nicely.

Now about this photo of Tessie and her bottle....I brought out a few items done in peyote stitch. Some of you expressed an interest in doing that. As I said before, there are all kinds of tuts for round peyote on the net. I just wanted to show you what can be done with peyote stitch going round and round.

Tessie is holding a perfume sample bottle that I made into a pendant. The rings under her feet were made around a form that was the same size as the finger I wanted to wear them on. The earrings were made around an orange stick and then slid off to put on the fringe. The two taller objects are simply tubes that the beads come in when you buy them. These are all basically straight sided cylinders. No increases or decreases.

When you have been at it for a while, you will learn to increase and decrease by adding and taking away beads.

This is what happens when you do that.

Someone asked about stoppers. For the bottle that Tessie is trying to take away, the cork is in front of it. I started with a circular peyote mandala and then when it was the size of the top of the cork, I simply stopped increasing and went down the sides in a tube.

The pencil is mostly just plain round peyote. Close to the point and just below the eraser, I decreased a couple of stitches so that it wouldn't slip off.

Tessie is trying her hardest to shrink the bottle in the last photo. It's not going to happen. It has rubbing alcohol in it and everyone knows that can't be shrunken. I think that does something to the properties of the bottle. I am keeping that one.

Back to work.

See you tomorrow.