Jewels and Bugles

Have you ever had a finished project turn out even better than you had hoped? For my most recent destash piece, I wanted to tackle the huge amount of transparent crystal bugle beads in my stash. As usual, I didn’t want to attempt weaving with them, so a multi-strand piece was the most efficient way to use up a lot of them fast.

I added a few other elements from the destash tray, including the last remnants of my ruby red rice beads, and ruby red pinch bicones. I’ve also got quite a few nearly finished packets of hex cuts and cube beads, so I grabbed some pretty teal blue hexes. All I needed was some seed bead bumpers, and I thought I had just enough silver-lined topaz for the job.

I liked the palette, but it wasn’t until I started building the first strand that I realized just how pretty all of the beads looked together. Instead of stringing beads at random, I used a repeating pattern of 4 hexes for every ruby bead, and the results were beautiful. The more strands I made, the better they looked. And by the time I was finished, I only had a finger full of gold seed beads left, and most of them were wonky - perfect!

Copyright 2012 Inspirational Beading
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