Description
This French beaded African Violet is a lot of fun to make. It may look like a lot of work, but I used a ‘cheat’ on the leaves, so they’re pretty fast to make. You’ll have to get the pattern to find out what it is though…!
Materials
You can make your French beaded African Violet with ‘variegated’ petals, as I did. Or, choose just the single colour. My French beading blog series includes a post on colouring. So, you can read the whole series starting here>>
For this pot plant, you will need:
- 40g size 11 seed beads for flowers
- 90g size 11 seed beads for leaves
- 24ga (0.5mm) wire to tone with your beads (ie one reel for the flowers and one reel for the leaves)
- Floral stem tape
- Embroidery silk
You can get all these supplies in my beading department on this website.
I strongly recommend using a bead spinner for this project. You are going to need to string a lot of beads and this will be quite a painful process if you attempt it by hand!
Experience and Techniques
This project is for beaders who have some French beading experience. The French beaded African Violet only uses the ‘basic’ technique. But I have assumed you are already familiar with this.
If you need to learn, I have a free tutorial that you can download from this website. Or, even better, my ebook, Bead Flowers and Wedding Bouquets’ teaches you from scratch, with video demonstrations. So, you might want to grab a copy here>>
About the French Beaded African Violet
This is a project that I designed when I first started beading, back in 2003. I have only just written up the pattern (2018!).
Back when I started, I never dreamed that I would one day be teaching others, or selling tutorials. But I did start designing right from day 1. Happily, I also made notes as I was creating my first flowers. I intended these to be reminders to me, but I’m very glad I have them now.
So, I am still working my way through my notebook, turning those notes into tutorials, like this.
Many of my original flowers ended up as gifts for friends and family. So, I’m having to re-make all the projects in order to photograph them now. This is taking some time, but it’s also rather nice to revisit my roots.
This French beaded African Violet was an early project. I have included instructions for the variegated flowers you see. But you can also make this with single colour flowers. As you probably know, there are so many beautiful colours from which to take inspiration. So, I hope you enjoy making your own version from my pattern.
