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Welcome to the beading techniques instruction pages! If you have any difficulty following these beading techniques, please post a comment at the bottom of the page on which you are stuck, and I'll do my best to help!
Beaded Flower : Look what happens when you have many repeating loops of beads! Wouldn't it be nice to have a shortcut to crossing the two ends of fishing line together after every loop? Well, there is. The beaded flower to the right was made by repeatedly self-crossing the same end of the fishing line through a bead at the end of every loop. Just make a simple circle of beads at the base of the flower (under the petals), tie the two ends of fishing line together into a knot (rather than crossing a bead), then using only one end of the fishing line at a time, continually loop round and round the beads in your circle, adding lots of smaller beads to form the petals. More details on how to do this are in the beaded flowers section of this website.
Beaded Horse : What's going on with the horse's tail? It's a slightly more complicated version of the unidirectional cross shown on page 2 of this techniques section. It's done with only one end of the fishing line, and you can see that we form a tiny loop on the end, with a huge strung line of beads leading up to it. What you do is take one end of the fishing line at the base of the tail and string all the white beads and green beads onto it in sequence, then string right back through all the white beads in the opposite direction, skipping the green beads. It's basically a uni-directional cross with a gigantic pointy part (the white beads). I guess you could even call it a reverse uni-directional cross. Whatever, you call it, it's cool! I just made it up. Make up your own! One idea is to try making the figure 8. Just make a loop on both ends and uni-cross the central bead. Try!
Beaded Cat : Okay, two things to notice about the beaded kitty. One, the paws (bottom right red circle). The four paws (all identical) were done using the self-cross beadweaving technique. The first step is that both ends of the fishing line cross at the bead labelled with the red dot, which is going to be the base bead of the self-cross around it (at this point the paw hasn't been beaded yet). Then you drop one end of the fishing line and use only the other end to perform the self-cross in order to add the cat's paw. So, onto one end of the fishing line, you add the 3 beads making up the paw (pink, blue and pink beads), then string back through the bead with the red dot on it. You've basically looped around that bead, but in the process, added 3 new beads to the pattern! The second thing to notice about the beaded cat is the tail (top left red circle in the picture). This tail is a simplified version of the horse's tail above. There is no loop at the end, but it uses the uni-directional cross. You add the two pink and one blue beads on one end of the fishing line, and then come back through the two pink beads in the opposite direction, skipping the blue bead. See, a uni-directional cross in which no loops at all were made! Cool! Keep experimenting! I'll soon be adding more beading techniques to this website, as I progress through making it!
