Good, Good, Now we’re Making Some Progress

For my second iteration, I decided to make a pair of earrings. Since I had made a beaded chain in my first iteration, I thought that making a pendant next is the ideal progression. For simplicity’s sake, I chose a pendant pattern (for radial symmetry). I purchased a set of beading needles for this (and the next) project, and it made the job so much easier…but a surprising source of help were my tweezers! They were invaluable for jamming my needle into the beads when the space became too tight, grasping at the tiny bit of needle that made it in to pull it all the way out, grabbing and threading tiny little seed beads, and so on. As you can see from the first earring, I made several mistakes—none of which were particularly major by themselves, but little mistakes that added up to a very malformed result. For example, in the first one, I made a mistake in the number of “bicone” beads (the blue ones) which have been corrected in the second one. That in result messed up the placement of the seed beads (the little white ones), which changed the shape of the outline, and that changed the placement of where the earring finding (the part that goes into your ear) hangs. Lastly, on the first one I threaded the beads too loosely, whereas on the second one, I threaded it too tight. Also, the instructions called for a yard (or three feet) of thread each earring…which means that six feet of thread was used in total! It also took 5+ hours (in chunks)

Note: I skipped one step in the instructions (step five) because otherwise the beads did not have a large enough opening to hold all the multiple reloops. I don’t know how much this would affect the overall stability of the earring, especially because I didn’t use the same thread that the instructions called for, but I also used slightly different beads, so oh well!

P.S. I'm very sorry for posting this so late! For the past few days, my family has been in the process of moving so it was packing/loading/unpacking/cleaning/etc. :(((

the magical wonderful beading needle!!!

making the first one :(((

the second one is so much nicer!! Look at the needle though!

Here's what they originally looked like

a side by side comparison