acrafterslife

My oldest daughter and I started beading at about the same time. As we don’t live close, it came as a surprise to both of us to find the other one was interested in the same new craft. She would get a design idea in her head, sit down with beads and thread and figure out how to put the beads together to look like she wanted them to.

I would get a tutorial, learn a stitch, then find a pattern that used that stitch and make a piece of jewelry from the pattern. I was envious of her creativity and thought I’d never be able to do anything without a pattern, but she kept encouraging me to just try. After all, she didn’t even know that the stitch she used to do everything was called right angle weave until I told her, but she had mastered it through trial and error.

I finally got up the courage to lay out a pallette of beads and just “doodle” until I’d come up with a design. Hence my name The Bead Doodler. At first these were simple “from scratch” projects. Then I learned to do Russian beaded lace. The possibilities for designs within the netting is endless and I made several designs before I moved on to another stitch.

When I wrote the previous post on netting, I went back and looked at some of the netting I had done and found this African netting stitch that I learned to do from a tutorial by Emily Hackbarth.

I looked at it more closely, and I began to see designs within the net. I sat down and worked a couple of designs and the more I work with it, the more design possibilities I see.

If you’re a crafter, but you think you will always need a pattern, just take your chosen craft, sit down with it and play. Have fun! That’s what crafting’s all about.

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