Bead Craft Class

During the Easter holidays, I and Little Lady attended a family craft workshop at her school library.  The sessions was on jewellery making so I thought it would be nice for us to do as we both enjoy making our own jewellery.

We started by following instructions from a worksheet and the instructor to make a keyring in the shape of a little person.

We had to pick beads for the head, body, feet, hands and some long thin bugle-type beads for the arms and legs.

I watched whilst Little Lady threaded the body parts together

The whole person was fairly easy to string onto two wires up unitl the neck and an additional two wires for the arms.  The wire was looped back on itself at the hands and feet to secure the beads.

Where the wires emerged at the top of the persons head they were coiled tightly over a matchstick and then pulled slightly to make some crazy hair.

We the secured the keyring and chain to one of the wires.  There is a nice tutorial for how to make these here. 

The second thing we tried was simple bead-weaving which always seemed very complicated and fiddly to me.

We were asked to measure some elasticated string which was twice the circumference of our wrists.  We then picked out roughly enough beads to go round wrist twice. The beads used here were basic pony beads.

We taped our string to the table with masking tape and started threading the beads through one pair of beads and then the other string through the same pair of beads as below.

Little Lady quickly had enough to go round her hand.  I tied the two ends of the string up to form the bracelet below.

I haven't tried this before because I thought it looked like a lot of work for an effect that didn't seem a little too simple.  But after this workshop, I realised how therapeutic something like this and with the right beads and threads how pretty something like this could look.

We got home and Little Lady promptly made me this ring.  It's nice that she felt motivated to try other things and we both enjoyed the session.