Beading Tutorial: Nepal Chain Stitch

Nepal chain is an incredibly easy beading technique, perfect for bracelets and delicate necklace straps. It’s also an excellent bead weaving technique for beginners, providing a beautiful but simple piece of beadwork that works up quickly. A basic understanding of tension and working with beading thread is all you need to master this stitch.

The technique itself isn’t very versatile - there isn’t much room to change up the beads or add embellishments. But you can create a lot of different looks by changing the bead colors and patterns. You can start with a simple flower palette, or experiment with unique looks by using different colors for the vines or petals.

To weave a Nepal chain strap:

Attach a stop bead to a comfortable length of beading thread, and pick up 3 vine beads and 5 petal beads. Slide them down to the stop bead.

Pass back through the 3 vine beads, and pull the thread snug. The petal beads should form a round cluster at the top of the stack.

To step up, pass back up through the top 2 vine beads and pull snug.

Pick up 3 new vine beads, and 5 petal beads. Slide them down to the beadwork. Pass back through the 3 vine beads and pull snug to form a new flower cluster with the petal beads.

This time when you step up, you will pass through only the 5th petal bead from the previous stitch. This is the one closest to the new stitch, at the center of the chain. Pull the thread snug.

As you work, press the beadwork along the center each time you add a new flower, to keep the chain from twisting. Strong tension is important, since there are natural gaps between the stitches. Make sure to pull your thread snug and keep the beads as tight together as possible to minimize the gaps and achieve a neat beadwork chain.

Pick up 3 vine beads and 5 petal beads, and repeat the previous stitch, stepping up through the 5th petal bead from the previous flower. The chain works in a zig-zag pattern, with new flowers alternating from side to side.

You can finish the chains just about any way that you wish. To make my Nepal chain bracelets, I added the loop half of the clasp at the working end, and mimicked the step up stitch to secure it to the beadwork with a more natural look.

Nepal chains would also make interesting fringe or dangles. You could finish off the top of the chain by adding the last flower, then weaving all the way through the previous one instead of stepping up to add a new stitch.

Win These Bracelets

This technique is so much fun to work with - like a daisy chain, only more interesting. Once you’ve got the sequence down, stitching is a breeze.

Happy beading!

Copyright 2011 Inspirational Beading
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A Bracelet a Week: Unusual Flowers

Some of the most interesting bead stitches are also the least commonly used ones. Peyote, herringbone and brick stitch are so versatile that they show up everywhere, and the ones that don’t have much room for adaptation get left behind. This week, I thought it would be fun to play with one of these not-so-useful techniques.

Nepal chain is a very easy and very pretty beading technique that hardly ever gets used. Like other flower stitches, such as daisy chain, there isn’t much that you can do with it besides make a chain and put a clasp on the ends. Still, it’s so adorable that it’s a wonder that it almost never appears either in beading books or our designs.

The stitch creates a very simple chain of flowers on a zig-zagging vine. It’s very tempting to pair it with classic flower colors, and I almost went with a tulip inspired palette of green, red and yellow. However, I didn’t want to make something that was so obvious. I thought it would be more fun to see if I could use color to make a cute stitch look more sophisticated.

The first palette I created was still nature-inspired. I started with matte olive and added purple and indigo for the flower shapes. It could be wisteria, or grape vines, and although pretty, it isn’t exactly ‘cute’. With only two colors for the buds, I used a simple two by two pattern.

Nepal chain works up really quickly, and is quite fun to do, so I decided to keep going. And of course, I snapped some pictures so that I can share a tutorial for the stitch next week. For the second bracelet, I chose a fiery palette, with black for the vines, and flowers in red, orange and mauve lined topaz.

With three colors to work with, I used an alternating pattern. Because each flower is added to the opposite side as the last, adding three different colors in the same sequence creates a zig-zag pattern. When you look at the chain at an angle, the flowers are paired up on the diagonal.

What’s interesting about the two bracelets is that the first one still looks like a flower chain. The red and black bracelet doesn’t much resemble flowers, even though the shapes are exactly the same. The vines along the center of the chain aren’t anchored to a central core, but when green is used, the flowery effect is still there. Take away the natural colors, and it’s just a very clever bead stitch.

I also experimented with a new button style that I really like. I wanted something that was flowery but sturdy. The looped edging reminds me a little of bachelor buttons. I think I’ll be using them a lot in the future.

Copyright 2011 Inspirational Beading
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