Beading – R+P style

It’s no small secret I like beads.

I like beads in lace because they add weight, they make the shawl hang “just” right… and they’re shiny. I’m a girl  dammit, I like shiny stuff.

Until recently I thought “everyone and their dog knows how to bead”. But I also thought everyone and their dog knew how to block lace and it’s my highest ranked blogpost here… so why not show you guys how I bead, so you can add some shiny weight to your latest most beautiful lace?

Let’s talk beads for a minute. You’ve beads and then you’ve BEEEEADS. Seed beads are the most common for using when knitting. Their roundness allows for the eye to catch more of their glimmer.

In this case I’ve chosen Miyuki Delica Beads. They were purchased impulsively in New York, at the place I baptised as the Mecca of beads on 37th St (or was it 38th? – in any case there were floor to ceiling shelves of beads, beads, beads, beads!!).

Delica beads are cylindrical. They are a small teeny tube, which catches less glimmer than regular rounded beads, but they sit perfectly on the stitch!

There are other types of beads, like Bicones, Pyramids, Bugles, Cubes…. and more and more and more! You can get regular beads, semi-precious beads, silver beads, even Swarovski  beads – I love experimenting with beads, can you tell??

The most used beads are seed beads – regular run of the mill spherical beads are transparent inside, but you can also get silver-lined beads. These are the best – they wrap the yarn in the silver foil inside them and you get JUST the glimmer of the colour of the bead. AMAZING.

Sizing is another matter. Beads tend to be sized like this: number/0. Size 10/0, like I used for this tutorial and my Adoro Shawl, are meant to be snug on the thread – you probably won’t get anything bigger than laceweight through the hole. Size 8/0 is ideal for heavier laceweight, and sizes 6/0, 4/0, are perfect for fingering weight.

I could talk about colour but what would be the point? You can easily see there’s PLENTY to choose from, so much so you will be overwhelmed and unable to choose only one (or is that just me?). My advice – glossy beads are much better than matte beads, and make sure the colour stands by itself, if it blends easily on the yarn you may not get the oomph factor (however, if you want to make something just weigh, you can use a colour similar to the yarn. I did this with Campana).

Regarding numbers – always buy more than you need. This is not a reckless-impulse-purchase note, it’s a game of percentages:

1. 80% will be used in your knitting
2. 5% will be lost in the folds of your sofa
3. 5% will fall and be vacuumed (by either a household appliance or a pet)
4. 5% will have too small a hole to put the yarn through
5. 5% may even break.

For you to bead like the rockstar you are, you will need a small container. There are specific beading containers, which if you do a lot of beading you can learn to appreciate and need, but for the occasional here and there, a small tin or empty lipbalm tin will do perfectly! As long as it has a flat surface that you can put on a table or armrest without risking it tipping over, you’ll be fine.

Put a small amount on it, don’t dump all your beads in it at once (the likelihood of options 2, 3, 4 and 5  happening is FAR higher if you do that) and keep refilling as needed.

When buying, there are 2 schools of thought – those who think you can guess the amount of beads from the length of the string or the depth of a tube (seriously, this happened to me in Canada and they told me “if I beaded enough I’d know!” O_O) and those who tell you “1g contains approx THIS QUANTITY of these beads”. If in doubt and you want to play safe, Google. Some manufacturers include the approximate count per weight, and others may not, but you can find somewhere that gives you an approximation. Remember, the material will make a difference – that small amount of silver foil makes beads weigh more than your run of the mill bead.

Now, let’s talk placement.

There are 2 ways – my way or the highway. Nah, just kidding.

One way is to place beads as you go along, the other is to pre-string them in yarn.

As you go along has an advantage in that, well, if you end up not wanting to bead, just avoid it and you’re done.Try that with pre-stringing.

Pre-stringing is a tricky business. You must ensure you’ve a smooth yarn, no knots, you may be about to string hundreds of beads into yarn, and hundreds of beads take a lot of yarn yardage, which means you’ll have to ball up beaded yarn and push ALL the beads down as you knit. Not much fun, but if you’re going for the drip look (as in Rocio’s edge), it’s perfect.

As you go along makes the bead sit perfectly on the stitch, you don’t have funny tug and pull at the yarn moments… but you do have to stop, grab the tool, put the bead, drop the tool and start knitting again. Which can piss people off. I honestly have developed SUCH a fast way that when we were taking the photos for the tutorial I had to stop and think about my method before photographing it!

And what tool is this I talk about?

I use a TINY crochet hook. It’s so tiny I’ve stabbed myself with it by accident. It’s a Clover 14 (0.50mm) steel hook. This is as small as they go I believe, and it’s the perfect size for 10/0 beads. The bigger the bead the bigger the hook can be, but it all depends not on the actual bead size but on the hole size.

The other method is to string floss or silk thread on a small sewing needle and string the beads in it. I find this method somewhat confusing, even if it was the first method I used. If you find that after I show you the crochet hook method you’d rather know how to do it with the needle, I’ll make another tutorial for it.

I will stop now, as I’m running long and I haven’t even SHOWED you how to do it yet. But keep visiting, part 2 will come soon and I will show you how I bead as I go along.

Next up – beading with a crochet hook!