Another bracelet

My other clothes might have been storebought, but I couldn’t resist a few more handmade bracelets. I have kind of an obsession with them.

The basic premise behind this bracelet was floating around in my head for literally the past nine years, so it is such a relief to get it out of there. I basically just needed to get my beading skills up to the level of my ideas.

I started by using the brick stitch to bead the gray sections, then wove in all the remaining threads. I found this amazing animated tutorial to show you exactly how it’s done.

Then I tied a thread onto one end of the clasp, threaded on a bunch of seed beads, threaded that through one of the rows of the gray brick stitched piece, threaded more seed beads, then another brick stitch, etc. until the bracelet was the size I wanted. I did this seven more times so there was a turquoise beaded thread running through each row of my brick stitch beaded pieces.

Then I did it again exactly the same way, eight times (once for each row) out of the brown beads.

Then I did it again with the turquoise, only this time I added a few beads between each gray piece so that it would kind of hang loose and flapper-y, and then did it yet again with the brown beads the same way.

32 total strands – 1 tight turquoise, 1 loose turquoise, 1 tight brown, 1 loose brown. 8 times each.

All tied onto a multi-strand bracelet clasp.

When I first had this idea, I imagined the woven pieces to be done out of the same small seed beads as the strands, without thinking through how I was going to get a thread through that tiny bead at least six times. That didn’t work so much. But these larger square beads are perfection.