- 11/0 seed beads Toho "Antique Bronze" (223)
- 8/0 seed beads Toho "Antique Bronze" (223)
- Silky beads "Purple Velvet Matte"
- SuperDuo beads "Pastel Bordeaux"
I finished the birthday beading a couple days ago and managed to find enough time to make today's bracelet. However, I didn't have a chance to take photos of it until today. I spent the rest of today working on designing my Dad's birthday card and printed it. I've got one more birthday card to make as well as some little gift boxes to put the beaded items in. I found a cute little box template that's just the right size to hold a bracelet or a pair of earrings or two. I found the template online HERE. Now I need to choose some pretty floral designs to print on the boxes. I should work on those today but I'm itching to try out the new MiniDuos that came in the mail yesterday. I ordered four colors from Aria Design Studio and they're all metallics.
Vivian's bracelet turned out very nice but I did have some trouble getting the length right. I thought for sure that 12 Silkies would be enough for my size but the beadwork shrunk up a lot more than I expected. I had to extend the length with eight jump rings. I also found that the bracelet stitching comes out quite a bit looser in an actual bracelet vs the small samples that I made the other day so it's a much softer bracelet than I thought it would be. No matter how hard I tried, I kept ending up with too much slack in my thread as I added to the initial string of beads. That's partly why it was so hard to judge the length. Until I started adding beads to the base of the bracelet, it seemed very long because of all the space between the beads. Thankfully, the thread did all get pulled up and hidden when the outer rows of beads were added. Now that I've made my first "Vivian" bracelet I know that I should use thirteen Silky beads to make a 6-inch bracelet for myself and probably fourteen Silkies if I use Miyuki seed beads. I probably will stick with Toho beads though because they just work better than Miyuki seed beads for this pattern.
You can read more about this pattern in my previous post HERE.