international beading week

International Beading Week 2024 – 27th July to 4th August

I’m a teeny bit early, but International Beading Week 2024 is almost upon us and I’m too excited to wait. IBW is run by the UK Beadworkers Guild, and you can find out more about the events and activities they and beaders all over the world have planned by visiting the website here, or join in on Facebook via the IBW Group here . As it’s the school holidays here in the UK my ability to join in events is pretty limited, so Social Media and that IBW Facebook in particular is probably where you’ll see me doing my IBW thing…….

I’m an IBW Permanent Ambassador, and in common with many other Ambassadors, designers and beaders I try to donate a pattern to the free pattern library every year. Sometimes it’s a simple charted design, sometimes a more complex project like last year’s I Love Heart Beads bead embroidery challenge. This year I’m back with straight beadweaving with a very silly new stitch developed for the 2024 theme of ‘Celebration’ – Balloon Dog Weave.

All celebrations need balloons, and the very best balloons are those fabulous sculptures made by twisting and shaping long thin balloons. The most glorious of these is undoubtedly the simple Balloon Doggy. Even Jeff Koons makes art from them – you can see one we spotted on the Grand Canal in Venice below, so this year I thought I’d try to make some in beads. Once I’d made an individual one for fun I started to see that they could be linked together to form a chain of doggies. Additional links to mirrored pairs stabilise the weave, and give you a whole pack of doggies to play with.

This isn’t a full tutorial (mine usually contain much more detail), it’s just a quick stitch guide/outline made as a gift from me to you, which you can play with as you will – do show me your balloon doggies in the IBW Facebook Group, or on my own social media – I’d love to see them please!

The new patterns will be launched on the IBW site at the beginning of IBW (Saturday 27th July), but mine is already available here for my special readers.

In addition, every year I try to offer a discount in my shops – this year I’m offering 20% off all tutorials in my Etsy and Payhip shops, and I may run some other offers on beads, crystals and other items during the week if time permits. The offers will run for the whole of IBW (which is actually 9 days, not 7) – so 27th July to 4th August. This is pretty much my main ‘sale’ of the year and the only time I offer this level of discount, so don’t miss out. Please note the discount will not start until the 27th (but don’t worry, tutorials don’t sell out!!).

IBW 2023 – ‘I Heart Beads’ version 6

OK, I did another one – I skipped a day or so earlier in the week so catching up now! This is nearly the last (I’ve finished one more this afternoon and then I have plans for a completely bonkers one as a final hurrah), and I’ve kept it quite simple whilst trying to include some new touches to keep the experimental spirit going. If you’re at the Bead Embroidery Zoom tomorrow (Saturday) morning you might get to see how that’s progressing when I walk you through some of my work.

As you may have noticed I bought some sheets of metallic pleather recently so I’ve gone back to those for the base and backing here. Nice and simple – here are the steps and the template and stitch guides are as ever in with the new for 2023 IBW patterns on the Guild website.

1) Black hard felt foundation, rainbow metallic heart (cut from the purple/blue area).

2) Ribbon is white ultrasuede with back stitched DMC stranded cotton letters. I did many of the banners in a batch earlier in the week working on a frame, this was an early one and I think the stem stitched ones I’ve used on other pieces were better.

3) 1.25mm black pearl purl around the ribbon and heart.

4) Seeded tiny flower sequins and size 11 and 8 seeds in diagonal bands for simplicity, all with the seeds as stop beads. The pleather makes enough of a statement so I just wanted to get the feeling of a scatter of flowers across it.

5) Backed in the metallic pleather, with an edging of black 11 seeds, then round again to add the 15 seeds as a mini picot edge for a bit of frilliness (and because I’d only used plain edging until this point).

Really nice and quick to make, and I think quite pretty. Looks even better in the flesh because of the shine from the metallic finish.

IBW Patterns

IBW 2023 ‘I Heart Beads’ version 5

I hope everyone is having a wonderful IBW – I’m certainly enjoying making time to focus on beading. As you know I’m working using my donated ‘exploration’ PDF – a template and set of stitch instructions and ideas for a bead embroidered ‘I Heart Beads’ brooch, and every day or so I’m sharing the results. It’s kind of a week of making samples.

Today I’ve stuck with the heavily beaded style I shared yesterday, but if I’m honest I don’t think this one is as successful. I think it’s probably missing the flat 3 & 4mm sequins I love to use so much – I didn’t have them in the right shade and I wanted to stick with beads as a test. I think some of the bead groupings are also too numerous – this is after all quite a small piece so I need to probably stick to groups of 3, 5 or 7 of anything bigger than an 11. On the other hand I’m still keen on the stem stitched letters (with serifs!) and going back to the cup chain and a beaded sunshine edge worked (the eagle eyed amongst you will notice I didn’t put a black edging on the heart prior to that edging, which was a change and looks fine).

Steps were:

1) Black foundation, purple heart (both hard felt) and white ultrasuede ribbon with stem stitched letters (3 strands DMC). Ribbon edged with couched 2mm Black cup chain from my Etsy shop. No black edging round the heart at this stage.

2) Stacked cup beads, 4mm and 3mm rounds and FPs. Seeded Rizos, and 3.4mm drops (I didn’t have any 2.8mm which I missed – I like using both sizes together). I used to many drops together so I popped a couple of teeny flowers on to break them up (made from shrinkets coloured with acrylic inks).

3) Black ultrasuede backing, then a simple black 11 seed sunshine (brick stitch) edge.

So overall good, but not as good as the red one. I’ll get the sequins back out for the next one – lesson learnt. If you’d like to see what I’m up to or look at the other kindly donated patterns then they are all on the @beadworkers website in the #InternationalBeadingWeek section here – https://beadworkersguild.com/free-patterns/

IBW 2023 ‘I Heart Beads’ Version 4

Yesterday’s Barbie version of my ‘I Heart Beads’ brooch may have been a big pink failure, but hopefully today you can see I took what I learnt, made some slightly different decisions and came up with something which is very me and actually works! Whilst the pre-Barbie versions were light on beads, this one brings me back to the heavily encrusted style I usually work with and I was relieved to be able to use it. So, here’s what I did:

1) Back to ultrasuede for the ribbon, and stem stitched letters with 2 strands of black DMC cotton.

2) Red hard felt heart on another piece of black hard felt. No padding. Both heart and ribbon outlined with couched 1.25mm black pearl purl.

3) Beads added with stacking (cup beads on varying height 11 seed stalks, sequins sandwiched with seeds for height and texture, size 8 seeds stacked singly). All with size 15 seed stop beads.

4) Other beads added with seeding – rizos, small czech drops, miyuki 2.8 & 3.4mm drops, and 11 seeds.

Those two combinations allowed me to vary the finished heights for interest and texture – work as if you’re contouring a landscape, with gradual transitions between the higher and lower patches using either the stacking on stalks of fringe or varying sizes of bead.

5) Finally backed on black ultrasuede and finished by couching black 1.25mm pearl purl onto the edge to hide the layers. I’d tried using seed beads but it looked too busy.

So the big lesson today was about getting some balance back – I pared back the black and white elements as far as they could go, and then went wild with the beads. A success!

IBW 2023 – ‘I Heart Beads’ – Version 3 – Barbiegeddon

The trouble with undertaking to publish every version of my ‘I Heart Beads’ IBW project here is that I have to show you the ones which didn’t work. Whilst that’s rather embarrassing for me I guess it’s an important principle to help us all remember that not everything we attempt comes out how we envisioned, but we still learn from trying. So, with a deep breath and some embarrassment (and amusement) I have to tell you that the promised Barbie version totally failed! I made a number of very bad decisions which I hope sharing here will stop you from repeating……….

1) I used a very stiff iridescent plastic fabric for the ribbon. Pretty, but hard to work with, and extra hard to write on with 1mm pearl purl. That might have worked on my usual ultrasuede but not on this stuff, particularly as all needle piercings left a visible hole. I need more practice with materials like this.

2) The ribbon somehow ended up about 1mm too far to the right and 3mm too far up, which has really significantly upset the balance. A silly mistake, and I should have realised as I was working.

3) I attempted to hide the mess with crystal lochrosen in a kind of ‘bubble’ effect which made it look even messier.

4) Something is wrong with the beading too – too many pink rizos, not enough sequins, the groupings are too small on the top section and I probably shouldn’t have bothered with the blue cup beads. What a mess.

5) The black cup chain, which worked really well on the previous versions now looks messy with the heavier beading. I should have gone with pearl purl to pull it back and give cleaner lines to balance it.

6) And finally the pink smooth purl I looped is the wrong shade – daft given the number of shades of pink I stock. Matching an iridescent fabric is tough and what worked in daylight doesn’t work in artificial light.

But all is not lost – I won’t be finishing this one, but I’ve learnt a lot, and I can frog it and re-use the beads and cup chain. And the even better news is that the one I made before I got sidetracked by #barbiecore actually worked, so I’ll show you that later!

IBW 2023 ‘I Heart Beads’ – Version 2

Hello again, here’s my second version of my ‘I Heart Beads’ brooch. I’ve gifted the template and stitch instructions to IBW, but rather than just one final version I’m going to try lots of different combinations of stitches and materials over IBW to show you all how versatile bead embroidery can be and encourage you to experiment (and if that experiment looks like mine that’s fine).

Anyway, this one is quite similar to the first one, with a few tweaks of course. Here are the key steps/ingredients:

1 – Black foundation again (hard felt) with a single layer of felt padding (heart shape 3mm smaller than template), followed by a metallic/iridescent artificial leather.

2 – White ultrasuede with ‘beads’ couched on using metallic DMC embroidery thread. I worked this on a larger sheet on an embroidery frame (I did several at once) and switched to thread as I hadn’t got the accuracy I wanted in my 15 seed backstitch yesterday. It’s better but this thread is a pain to work with and I guess I miss it actually being beads, so I’ll try some other options. The ribbon is again surrounded and attached to the main piece with couched down 2mm cup chain from my Etsy shop.

3 – The heart was also surrounded with couched down 3mm fuchsia cup chain, and I then used stacking to add some clusters of jewel coloured flower beads, with a tiny blue 15 seed as the stop bead, putting the central one on a stalk of size 8 seeds to add height.

4 – Metallic leather again as a backing, plus the brooch back, then used a cross between couching and a brick stitch edge to join the layers and capture a 1.25mm Pearl Purl on the edge. I did try a sunshine (brick stitch) edge in size 11 black seeds but it was too much next to the cup chain, but unfortunately I don’t think the final edge has enough black to get the tattoo look.

Verdict – great quick technique for a fun and flashy piece but considering the theme, definitely not enough beads on it! Also I promised something ‘Barbie’ and this doesn’t take it far enough (needs more pink!). Tomorrow I will be sure to go all in on the beady and Barbie front……

PS if you’d like to try this or the other gifted patterns they’re here on the @beadworkers website https://beadworkersguild.com/free-patterns/

IBW ‘I Heart Beads’ – Version 1

One of the great things about International Beading Week are the gifted patterns from a huge range of designers, beaders and of course the IBW Ambassadors. My gift this year is a little unusual in that it is more of a guide than a set of instructions – I’ve given a template and some detailed bead embroidery stitch guides, but not a ‘put this bead here’ step by step process. Instead I want beaders to embrace the freedom that bead embroidery can give you and strike out on your own – and I’m going to be doing the same, beading as many of the design as I can bear over the week, then posting right here to describe how I did it each time.

So here’s the first one and the steps to create it (refer to the tutorial for how to’s on stitches etc):

1) Black foundation, then three layers of red soft felt (3mm smaller than the template or previous layer each time) stitched in place. Silk velvet cut into the heart shape stab stitched around edge.

2) White Ultrasuede ribbon, held in place by couching on black 2mm cup chain. ‘Beads’ lettering added by backstitching 15 seeds.

3) Small selection of beads, bicones and lochrosen (crystal sequins) added using stacking and seeding (see tutorial).

4) Brooch back and black ultrasuede foundation added, then a simple ‘sunshine’ beaded edge (all included in the tutorial).

Learns – well if I’m honest the lettering is a bit messy, I’m not sure that I can face using beads for this step again! And the velvet is a bit messy round the edges – overall I don’t think this has the impact I was looking for yet – perhaps it’s too far from my usual style, although it was lovely and quick to work with a visible foundation fabric. Bearing those lessons in mind the next one will be OTT Sarah style I think – very encrusted and probably Barbie pink as that’s everywhere today! Stay tuned……..

PS if you’d like this or the other gifted patterns they’re here on the @beadworkers website https://beadworkersguild.com/free-patterns/

As part of the IBW social media team for several years it’s lovely to be able to show my support as a designer as well by becoming an IBW Ambassador. Beading along with others is such a pleasure, whether it’s done in person or remotely, and I’m looking forward to seeing the results all of the events and activities the IBW/Beadworker’s Guild team work so hard behind the scenes to prepare for you every year. This year’s International Beading Week runs from July 24th – August 1st, and as well as working away with my lovely colleagues on the Guild’s Social Media team I’ll of course be beading along with the wonderful annual Jean Power Summer Secret Beadalong.

As an Ambassador I’m proud to donate a design (or two or hopefully when I have time, three) to the event – here is the first one, a charted brick stitch and fringe piece which is available as a free PDF here. It’s also available via the IBW section of the Beadworker’s Guild website alongside many other wonderful free patterns from other Ambassadors and Beaders – have a look at the amazing selection.

This piece can be adapted to change the length, colours or overall use but at its’ core is the 12 colour spectrum of the IBW logo and a rainbow. The rainbow has come to mean a lot symbolically in the UK over the last year or so, so seemed an appropriate choice, although making curves out of things which want to run straight was a challenge – quite a few rejected versions here:

It’s also worth saying that this chart was created with Beadographer, which is a wonderful new chart/design tool. Prior to starting using this I’d never really got on with charted designs because I found the planning process inhibiting creatively. However I’m sure you can see from my recent work that Beadographer has allowed me to overcome that bias and I’m now embracing charting with the tool on my laptop (or even better on my iPad with an Apple Pencil) as an alternative way of creating with beads, so thank you to Leah and William for a super, very easy to use creative tool.

Secret Beadalong Day 8

With just a few days left of International Beading week as well as looking after my Etsy shop with a lovely 20% discount on all tutorials, I’m as usual doing Jean Power’s Secret Beadalong – Day 8 joins the pairs of rivolis together but leaves some mysterious gaps? One more day to go and I’m starting to have an idea of where we’re going but still not sure!

If you’d like to join in it’s not too late – pop over to Jean’s website and sign up! If you just want to watch then you can see what we are all up to on her Secret Beadalong Facebook page.

Secret Beadalong Day 7

As usual for International Beading Week I’m doing Jean Power’s Secret Beadalong – Day 7 completes the skirt on the lovely Bermuda Blue dome crystal and adds a long strap. Lots and lots of herringbone in 15s…….

If you’d like to join in it’s not too late – pop over to Jean’s website and sign up! If you just want to watch then you can see what we are all up to on her Secret Beadalong Facebook page.