This month's Bead and Button shows a RAW necklace with flowers or spear beads as embellishment. I didn't have the right flowers in the house, so I made one with fruit beads, which turned out to be my Bacchus fertility necklace.
(see photo at
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in the Summer Beadwork album)Deciding that I like Right Angle Weave for the first time in my life, I started poking through the beads for other crystally kinds of things. I came across several hanks of Czech cathedral beads. (for picture, see
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I made the base of a second necklace in the style of the first one, only using Cathedral beads in place of the fire polished rounds. Wow. What an impression it makes, and looks great even without embellishment. I then took some of those beads and made a one square wide RAW bracelet. I quickly ran back over the bracelet with some little gold seed beads to cover the thread between the Cathedrals. Double Wow! The bracelet took me a whole fifteen minutes to make, including finding the beads, threading the needles, enforcing the "no dishes in the living room" rule and helping with algebra homework.
Without distractions, a reasonably quick beader could throw these together in
5-7 minutes, tops. And they look like they're hard to make, and are sparkly and very, very attractive. I tried to photograph the bracelet, but the beads are a wierd shade of picasso plum with bronze ends that doesn't photograph well at all. But I think my word picture will give you the idea.To tie into another thread, I think I know how Cathedral beads are made. A transparent glass center is dumped all over with a metallic bath. Then, facets are made with a crystal facteting machine. It then gets a quick trip into the kiln, like a fire polished bead. Maybe a little quicker than the normal fire polished bead, because the cuts are a little sharper and less rounded.
Kathy N-V