Description
About this Bead Bracelet Tutorial
This bead bracelet tutorial is one of my earliest designs using Chilli beads. I was experimenting to see how they could be combined in traditional bead-weaving techniques.
In this instance, I thought I would try out Peyote stitch. Now, I soon discovered that the distinctive curved shaping of these beads caused my design to behave in a slightly unexpected manner. Happily, this wasn’t a problem. I found myself naturally flowing from the Peyote stitch base into a netted area of embellishment that gave a lovely natural curve to the bead bracelet. I finished the design with a beaded clasp taken from my book of that name. So I have not included the clasp instructions in the bead bracelet tutorial. If you do not have a copy of the book, you can easily use any clasp of your choice.
Materials and Techniques
For this project you are going to need two colours of Chilli beads. If you have never used these beads before, then you can find a handy blog here that tells you more about them and offers some helpful tips for working with them.
You are then going to combine the Chilli beads with Miyuki seed beads and 4mm pearls to create the embellishment. As you may notice from the images in the gallery, the design that results is asymmetric. So you can wear it with the embellishment on show or the textured Chilli bead section on show.
You will need to keep excellent tension as you bead this bracelet. So if you find that tricky, I would advise repeating your thread paths to pull everything in nice and tight. I also suggest that you keep to Miyuki seed beads. You will find that different seed bead brands vary slightly in size, so I cannot guarantee how the design will work with another brand. The bead bracelet tutorial has detailed instructions and lots of diagrams to guide you through this project.
If you enjoy working with Chilli beads then you might also like the Waterlily bead bracelet tutorial which you can find here.
