My favorite beads and cabochons for bead embroidery

The Bible of Bead Embroidery Knowledge: The Traveller

I recommend starting here if you are new or want to deepen your existing knowledge. If you would like to bead any of the more complicated jewels in the future, you will need to be 100% comfortable with the basics. The more advanced tutorials don’t repeat all the hints and tips every time, so before you dig deeper, please, give yourself some time, and bead a traveller. The instructions are extremely detailed, everything is recorded on video, and you can watch them as many times as you need. There are also recorded Q&A sessions from the time when I was teaching The Traveller for the first time, that besides my insight, are also deemed with knowledge and experience shared by fellow, more experienced beaders.

After watching these videos and beading your first Traveller, you’ll be perfectly prepared to play with all the beads and components in this article!

Cabochons

I will start and close today’s article with the same type of material. I start here because these are my essentials, and most often, they guide me where I go and inspire a whole jewel. And I will return to them again at the end, because I have a surprise for you that I would like to share. I am talking about cabochons.

In bead embroidery, the easiest way to attach cabochons is to glue them on the foundation (most often Ultra Suede) and add seed beads around them to attach them securely to the fabric. The best is if you can use cabochons with flat backs. For example, gemstones and pressed glass cabochons are great. That’s why it’s also so easy to include coins in your beadwork and create a keepsake of a memory you will cherish.

Alternately, you can also bezel cabochons with Peyote stitch and attach the Miyuki Delica beads in the back row to the fabric after you finish the bezel and secure your tail thread.

Another easy and fast way is to fasten your glass cabochons into metal claws. You have then two choices: you can either sew the claw directly to the Ultra Suede as Zuzi did with the pears in her Genlis design, or bezel the claw with two rows of Delicas first (adding one row all around and then attach one more row on top of the first with square stitch) and then sew it down and play with it some more.

Seed beads

I will just briefly mention Miyuki seed beads, as I think that from mentioning bezels and seeing pictures of embroidery, you might know already that these are essential, in the same way as in bead weaving. It would be challenging to bead something without Miyuki Delica 110 and 15/0 seed beads, and very probably size 11/0 round seed beads will also come handy.

Round pearls and fire polished beads

Create a simple row of uniform beads after attaching your first cabochon to the Ultra Suede. The smaller the beads – the easier to arrange them nicely around the focal. I love working with 2 mm pressed glass beads, as you can see in the Sashiko pendant. When I work with bigger pearls or beads of any shape, at the end, it might be challenging to squeeze in the last one or to finish the row without a gap. When you are close to completing a circle, pick up the last few beads at once to measure how many you need. It’s always better to go for the smaller number if you are unsure. Avoid pushing the last bead in – I have ruined several otherwise good pieces this way, as at first it seemed it might work, but the motif could have stayed more nice and flat at the end.

Talking about the 2 mm pearls, to give you ample space to play with different colors, I asked the Team to restock them for our embroidery weeks, especially the beautiful collection that we added during last autumn and Advent.

For a more varied look while keeping the stitch simple, use interchangeably seed beads and pearls, for example.

Shaped beads and multi-hole beads

You can include different shaped glass beads in your embroidery pieces. Make sure your beads have at least one flat side to fit nicely to the foundation.
My favorite choices are:
– Tila-family,
– Origami Flower beads
– Table cut beads
– Lily flower beads
– Vexolo, Gemduo, 2-hole Dagger beads

How do you use them in your beadwork?

You have two options:

If you stick to mandala-shaped designs like the Traveller, attach first the inside holes of the beads, maybe with tiny seed beads in between. In the next step, you will need to figure out which bead or group of beads fits precisely into the gap between the second holes.

Alternately, create a grid with your special ruler, marking the lines at 90, 45, or maybe even 22.5 degrees. Attach shaped beads exactly on the lines, and the find the beads or groups of beads that go into the gaps.

Cup chain

The easiest way to bling up your bead embroidery. There is something very satisfying about attaching the rhinestones one by one.

A cup chain or rhinestone chain is a sequence of crystals set into metal claw settings and connected to each other. ‘The bridges’ are flexible, so you can follow the shapes of your cabochons or create a beautiful fringe using several of them at the bottom of your motif. When sewing them down, you can push the rhinestones close together or create gaps. Experiment with the different looks, and maybe even combine them in the same jewel!

Ball chain

You can use instead or even together with cup chain some metal ball chains. While sparkly rhinestones add a luxurious touch, ball chain is more on the rough rock ‘n roll side! You sew down the balls in the same way as you do with cup chain.

Filigree

You might have noticed over the years that I am absolutely in love with filigrees, especially the historic collection that we are reviving one by one from designs from the 1. half of the 20. century. Over the years, I found many ways how we can add them to our embroidery, and I would like to mention my two favorite ways.

Using the filigree as the focal, and embroidering around it or maybe even directly into it.

Adding the filigree on top of beadwork once the main part is done to create an asymmetric look. This is where you can hide the gaps if adding bigger beads didn’t work out perfectly 😀

Foundation and backing

Even if we already talked about them last week when we were discussing the basic tool kit you need for bead embroidered jewels, I’d like to mention Ultra Suede again. While you absolutely need these because of the nature of the technique itself, I’d like to emphasize that they also have a decorative role to play besides the functional.

You can take advantage of the beautiful colors by letting the foundation peak through, like in the Arabesque Garden and the Aztec Sun.

By creating a bracelet and attaching the main part onto the leather or Ultra Suede, the fabric gets a bigger role to play. Zuzi’s cuff.

Using the colorful accent on the back side – think about red soles on shoes!

Before returning to the cabochons, as promised, I would like to mention the Bead Embroidery tool kit you can still preorder for a better price before we start shipping them out during the next Beadingschool Academy Theme unboxing week (from 14. March, Thursday). The kit contains all the basic tools and some of the most interesting materials you can use in your bead embroidery projects, including an embroidery hoop, Japanese Tulip needles special for bead embroidery, an iron-on interfacing that you can use to make your pieces sturdier and which helps you to keep them flat. Two sizes of cup chain, a big historic filigree – and one of our new Beadingschool art cabochons will also fly to you inside the tool kit.

Beadingschool Art Cabochons

Once you get comfy with the stitches and use a less precious cabochon or simple coin, an easy way to take your jewels to the luxury level is to use something truly special as the focal. That’s why we decided to include a Beadingschool Art Cabochon in each of the Bead Embroidery Tool Kits! You can receive different colors of the Beadingschool Art cabochons. All of them will be the same size, round shaped, to ensure that you can start easily and apply the knowledge you learned from the Traveller immediately. Or, if you feel more confident, it might be time to do something different based on the inspiration from Zuzi, who combined her new Art Cabochon with her leftover beads from the Aurora Borealis Beadingschool Academy Theme Box. Even after creating so much, she still had plenty, and look what she has made for all of you to enjoy!

Applying the knowledge from The Traveller and following Zuzi’s instructions will enable you to create this spectacular statement piece, as well as this smaller beauty that Zuzi designed.

Probably the most frequent question that we got during the past years is if it would be possible to have a bead embroidered jewel connected to Beadingschool Academy Themes. And since we love making beady wishes come true, we want to make this a tradition from now on. And since at Beadingschool we are aiming not only for a ‘good enough’ experience but making you feel as if it was Christmas every day when a Beadingschool package lands on your bead mat (no matter if it’s December or July), we plan to release a new collection of Beadingschool Art Cabochons with every Beadingschool Academy Theme. A collection that complements the style, the shapes, and the colors perfectly.

Besides returning to the long-time favorites that I mentioned, a secret to creativity is a sense of novelty and curiosity created by new possibilities, exploring all those ‘what ifs’ to find out what works the best. So, of course, from time to time, I love, and I absolutely need to have new material on my bead mat…

It was the highest time for new goodies specifically designed for bead embroidery! Today, besides all the knowledge I have gathered about bead embroidery, I will also bring you something new and beautiful to play with!

What are the ingredients of the Aurora Collection?

Let’s do a little recap first! During this Theme, we are playing with magical blues, purples, and neutral tones with an extra sparkle, like the Crystal AB cup chain and the beautiful frosted fire-polished beads with the Aurora Borealis effect applied. Besides some well-known shapes, it was all the triangles you liked the most after unboxing (yes, we listen to you with open ears), and we traveled to the northern countries to look up at the winter sky and marvel at the beauty of this natural phenomenon. While standing still, enjoying the silence of the forest and the mountain slopes, maybe even spotting one of the elusive wintertime visitors that we share this moment with.

Let’s see, how did we translate all this into the very first Beadingschool Art Cabochon Collection: the Aurora Borealis!

The colors and shapes match the mood of the Theme perfectly. They are fantastic to use in your bead embroidery projects, as thanks to the flat back sides you can easily glue them down and then continue with rows as you learned from the Traveller series.

Also you can use them for bead weaving – preferably with tutorials that are a bit forgiving. Due to the handmade nature of art cabochons, there might be tiny differences in size. As we know very well, sometimes even half a mm makes a difference; that’s why I would like to point this out. Usually, bead embroidery is forgiving enough; that’s why I love using art cabochons when embroidering. Moreover, the Snowdrop we will publish soon is perfect for it, too, as you can easily adjust the number of Delica beads holding the cabochon tight.