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| Just Daisies
This technique creates a solid chain of daisies without stems. It makes a somewhat more substantial peice of jewlery than the simple daisy chain. Of course it also requires a bit more work. 
 Start
with as long a piece of doubled thread as you can handle. Wax it after
you thread your needle because you want the two sides to stick together.
You may either add the clasp now, or leave a long enough tail to add it
later. Pick up 6 red beads and tie them in a loop. Pick up one yellow bead
and go through the upper right hand bead on the other side of the loop.
Pick up 2 yellow beads and go up through the two red beads on the right
hand side of your first flower and back down through the two yellow beads
you just added.
Pick up 4 more yellow beads and go down though the top bead of the two yellow beads added previously forming a loop. Pick up 1 red bead and pass your needle through the top of the second of the two yellow beads on the right hand side of the loop. As you can see, both the yellow and the red daisies are created in essentially
the same way except for the position of your thread at the start and the
bead you go through when adding the center
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 Hand
Art! While my bead business
keeps me pretty busy, I'm lucky to have taught an after school club house
in Northhampton, Pennsylvania this Spring where one of the classes was
"Jewelry Design"! The first project we did is shown above, an original
work of art using the students own hand!
We used a product called PolyShrink™ which is available at some art and craft stores. We also sell the PolyShrink™ Jewelry Techniques Kit which includes 6 sheets and a booklet filled with instructions, tips and help at Eclectic Etc., Inc. PolyShrink™ is similar to the shrinky dinks your parents might have used as kids. To create our hand pins, we started by tracing our hands onto PolyShrink™ using permanent black markers. Next, we divided our hands into large areas to be filled with patterns. To make our pins really bright, we used contrasting warm and cool colors! Warm colors are: red, orange and yellow. Cool colors are: blue, green and violet. Notice how in each section of the hand above there are warm and cool colors? Makes the color stand out and "pop out" at you! The patterns were colored using Prismacolor™ colored
pencils (which are recommended in the PolyShrink™
Jewelry Techniques Kit). To make our hands small enough to use as
a jewelry item (here a pin) we followed the directions on shrinking our
hands and used tacky glue to attach a pin back when done!
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Would you like
to submit to Etcetera? Do you have a craft or tip you would like
to share?
webzine@eebeads.com
bead.
These positions alternate each time. When adding the center bead, always
go through the bead diagonal to the bead you are coming out of. This is
actually very intuitive when you've got the beads in your hands. Trust
me! Just continue this pattern until you reach the length you want and
add your clasp. I like to use a small loop of beads through the hole in
the clasp rather than just tying it on. Loop back through a couple of daisies
to hide the end and provide extra security. Good luck, and happy beading!