Everything Goes According to Plan (…not)

            My final iteration was unfortunately hindered by a couple of repeat mistakes! My idea was to make a necklace with a pendant, except what was different about this one was that they would be tubular, meaning that they are 3D, instead of the flat shapes I’ve been making so far. However, for the pendant, I misunderstood the instructions, in the very first line! It called for an “armspan” of thread, which I took to mean the length of an arm, but it really meant the length from the tips of one hand to another when the arms are held horizontally…everything else, I did correctly, despite the fact that the instructions were not helpful at all—I only understood them because of experience from the first two, and even then, I needed to Google terms for the knots because I had no way of knowing what a “tension knot“ could possibly be. The result was that I made it all the way to step nine, but had to stop. If you look at the picture below, you would see that only one side of the pendant becomes a tube shape, making it look like half a bagel. I also had to do some quick damage control and wing a way of adding on a jump ring instead of the beaded loop shown later in the tutorial. Another problem was that I used a “tension bead” that the instructions mentioned instead of my cute miniature clothespins, so I didn’t notice that I was pulling it closer and closer to the end of the thread until it was too late…I only had about two inches to make a knot with, so I had to use my tweezers to loop it into a simple knot.

For the chain, I decided to make a spiral rope. The tutorial was very easy to understand, and even though I didn’t have the right beads at all, I adjusted the number of beads needed based on how much they differed in size from the given example (I used a 2:5 ratio instead of a 3:5 ratio). Since it was going to be a necklace, and I knew that it would take a lot of thread, I decided to use all of the thread I had left over, which was slightly over five feet (seriously, when I stood up and held it to my height, it was taller than me…). However, I didn’t have enough thread (or beads) to make a necklace, so I had to change plans into a bracelet; when I ran out of the clear bicone beads I was using, I tried to change to using all seed beads to make the rest of the necklace (and changing it to a 4:5 ratio this time) but it was incredibly tedious and confusing, as I couldn’t differentiate which line of beads I was supposed to reloop into, and decided to settle on a bracelet and call it a day...it took a total of about 7 hours, I think, but  not all at once!!

this is the side without the tubular part

this is the side with the tubular part