Give Me a D

-
When I first started beading, I used wider needles than I do now. Quite often, the string I had would work just fine until I had to pass the string through a bead a second time or third time. The thick string I had in combination with the thickness of the needle would just kind of get the bead stuck right at the eye.

Since then, I've become a big fan of wide-eye needles (example here) and have amassed quite a pile of thin string in sizes 00, 0 and B.

Well, since the time I bought all of that string, I've found that yes, it passes through the thinnest of barrels quite nicely, but it isn't very strong. I started to notice that most seed-bead projects in Bead & Button and other magazines I've purchased recommend D-size thread. I have a few spools of that, but the 00, 0 and B sizes far outnumber the D.

Just last night, I got a little tired of making several extra passes through a bead with the thin threads to make up for their lack of strength and I put in an order at Fusions Beads. Now that I've made the order, I'm anxious to get it. Hopefully it doesn't take too long.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I've got a notion to sew a Halloween costume

-
Image
Now that I'm a mother , I find myself enjoying Halloween more than I ever did as a child. Case in point: Halloween 2015 was less than a week past when I began wondering what my daughter will wear next year. On a trip to Walmart, I sought out the Halloween leftovers and sifted through the costumes hoping to get an awesome costume — one that normally costs out of my price range — at half off. But I know two things about my daughter that made looking through those costumes a waste of time: She has growth spurts every few months. I could buy the next size up, but by next Halloween, she might be two sizes taller — or three even. (She's very tall for her age.) Her tastes come and go quickly. In the week since Halloween, she's already told me that next year she wants to be Wonder Woman, then changed her mind and said, "I think I want to be Sofia the First. " Once I realized the perfect 2016 costume wasn't on the rack, I got ambitious. Despite knowing l
Read more

"Contemporary Loom Beading"

-
My mother-in-law gave my husband and me a gift certificate to Barnes and Noble a while back, and we just got around to spending it last week. With my share, I purchased a beading book that had been on my Amazon wish list for quite a while, " Contemporary Loom Beading: A New Look at a Traditional Stitch ," by Sharon Bateman. Because I've been in the middle of a freelance project I work on twice a year, I haven't been able to do much more than thumb through the book, but I have to say, the  projects within have really piqued my interest. All of the loom work I have done has been basic, flat pieces that I learned to make years ago from my great-aunt . This book, however, features projects that have a little more dimension. For the most part, the loom work is done the same, but the book puts a new spin on what to do with what you create. It also features types of looms I didn't know existed, including one the author created herself . I look forward to putting so
Read more

More pumpkin earrings for Halloween

-
Image
As my older sister showed me the latest earrings she made, I couldn't help but laugh. Just like me, she had her mind on pumpkins. (And Frankenstein and Dracula, though she hadn't made earrings featuring those creatures yet). Nearly all earrings my sister makes are long, dangling creations in the Native American style,* and she brought that into her Halloween earrings. Here is what they look like: How adorable are those little pumpkin faces at the top? I also love the sparing use of turquoise-colored beads; they seem to be just the right amount of accent for the orange and black. My big sis never ceases to amaze me. After the false starts I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, I decided to nix the idea of using square stitch in my own pumpkin earring creations because it seemed too easy to move the beads out of shape. I think this was likely because I'm not all that skilled at square stitch, since it isn't a stitch I'd used before. However, in the inte
Read more