Collaborative Beading

Each year, for the past few years, the Bead Society of Victoria has made necklaces of beaded beads as a group project. We do this in Winter, at what we call our 'Busy Beads Weekend'. Every person that comes along makes a bead, then does what they feel like for the rest of the day. We buy rolls and cakes, and several members make soup for lunch. It's a lovely weekend! The beaded beads get assembled into necklaces which are then raffled off. The subsequent funds are used to fund members' community service projects.

This year, one concept for a necklace was actually bead embroidery and cabochons. Several people did either simple or embellished bead embroidery around a series of cabochons. I was then given the job of assembling them into a necklace. This was actually a lot harder than it sounds! The cabs were multiple sizes, multiple shapes, and two different colours. Many of them were regular ovals, but there were some irregular focal cabs. Simply arranging them all into a pleasing design was incredibly difficult.

I ended up using my phone to photograph a series of options, which I then sent to our workshop coordinator, LW. LW then came down to my place and we came up with a completely different idea altogether!

These photos are a bit rough because they are working photos, but they show how I tried a variety of ways to arrange the cabochons. Something I have learnt from working with multiple focals is that there are many different ways to arrange them, and it's worth while to take the time to explore a variety of options.

From memory I left the cabs on the beading mat for a couple of days and played around with them, taking a photo each time.

One of the hardest things to figure out this way is how the eventual necklace would actually 'drape' on the wearer. I really would have liked to have had a dressmaker's dummy when doing this, to pin the various pieces to. You could also temporarily stitch them together just with big tacking stitches I suppose.

Anyway, LW and I came up with a design that we were both happy with, and I got to work. All of these cabochons had been beaded by different people, and this meant that the stitching, particularly the edging, varied somewhat from cab to cab. This presented an interesting challenge - it meant that I had to work out different ways to join each set of cabs to suit the edging used.

I also had to play around with options for filling in the spaces between the focal cabs at the front. I used fire polished beads and seed beads and made joins that look a little like webs but are really netting. I think they came up really well, and helped to make the central point more cohesive.

The final piece is above, and a full-sized photo is on the BSV's web-site, or it can also be found on my Pinterest board. The photo is a bit skewed - there is a central line from the top of the central black cab to the bottom of the central triangular cab - when worn, that is the centre point of the necklace.

Lessons learnt: I learnt a lot about joining multiple pieces into one necklace. There's a real art to arranging all of the pieces so that they work together and sit well on the neck. I feel much more confident about trying my hand at making a bead embroidery piece with multiple components now. In fact I have one piece partly done (my Steampunk piece) that stalled partly because I wasn't confident with how to join everything together. Hopefully I will be able to get back to that now.

The raffle has been held and this piece is going to a lady in central Victoria. I sincerely hope she gets a lot of pleasure from wearing this necklace - I certainly enjoyed being involved in making it!

Bonus: I also ended up making a matching cuff - this was a prize for the person that sold the winning raffle ticket. This was actually my first bead embroidered cuff over a brass blank. I was really pleased with how this turned out, although it would have been much easier to start with a 'raw' cab - I used one of the leftover bead-embroidered cabs from the necklace, so it sits quite proud of the surrounding beadwork. Nevertheless, it looks great, and I'm really keen to try one for myself now!