Tutorial: Beaded Necklace Design

Hello hello! It's back to the regular schedule again, hooray! As promised, I come to you with my methods for designing beaded jewelry. Like I said last week, I've been beading for quite some time now (and beading well for at least a year or two!), so I have some insights to share on the subject of creating a necklace.

Now, the "tutorial" in the title is a little bit misleading, since I won't be showing you a specific technique or walking you through concrete steps that you must follow in order to get a nice finished product. Unlike knitting and crochet, there isn't really much of a technical barrier to making a simple beaded necklace. As long as you can string beads onto a thread and use a pair of pliers, you have the skills. The trick is in selecting and arranging the beads into a pleasing pattern in the first place, and that's not something I can teach you how to do step by step. There are, in fact, countless ways to make a beautiful finished product! With that in mind, I'll be showing you just one way: my way. Pick and choose ideas that you like from it, and I hope it'll help spark some beading creativity in you!

Enough of that exposition nonsense, though. Onwards, to crafting!

Most of my beading projects start with a seed idea. Maybe it's an outfit that I'm designing jewelry for, or a particular color palette I like, or a flower I thought was pretty. Oftentimes, though, it's a particularly interesting bead or pendant that I want to incorporate. For this project, I dug up a whole bunch of beads that looked like this:

Pretty, right? They actually came off of an old necklace I got at a garage sale. I have no idea where they come from, but I love the detailed, colorful flower on the black background. It was exactly what I needed for inspiration.

The reason I had taken the original necklace apart was that, while the beads were pretty, it was composed of all the same bead, just strung in a loop. There was no variety in size, shape, color, nothing. It made these beautiful beads look downright boring! I learned from this mistake and decided that I needed a set of beads that contrasted my focal beads, for variety. I settled on these gold-colored metal beads.

The different shape and different finish would lend some interest to the necklace, I hoped. And yet, these beads still had something in common, too: the flowers on the focal beads were outlined in gold, which matched the color of my contrast bead! Similarly, the contrast bead had some aging done to it that left a blackish patina in the crevices. So far, so good!

I was happy with just the two beads as the main notes in the necklace, but there was still a lot of space to fill. Some beaded jewelry is composed solely of large beads, but I prefer a more delicate style. And what else to use for that than seed beads?

Seed beads are minuscule and incredibly useful, so I tend to keep a lot around in these little plastic containers. For color choice, I used the focal bead as reference and took out any seed bead I could find that matched the colors of the focal bead. It ended up being quite a nice spread: that's the beauty of using an already-pretty item as your inspiration!

Now that I had all my components lined up, it was time to start thinking about the design in earnest. I knew I wanted to make a lariat necklace, which is a long, ropelike necklace with no clasp. Instead of latching it at the back of your neck, you wrap it a few times around your neck and let the ends dangle in front. Some lariats have a loop at one end to thread the other end through, while others might be tied or just left loose. I decided to go with the first option, and have one end of the strand terminate with a loop.

Since my lariat wasn't going to have a central pendant or anything, I started playing around with simple sequences of beads, laying them out on my workspace to get a feel for how they would look in a finished necklace. I ended up liking this quite a lot:

The 2:1 ratio of focal bead to accent bead keeps the focus on the focal beads, I think. I liked it in any case, so I kept it! The next step was to design the seed bead pattern to fill the space in between the larger beads. A single strand of seed beads looked too plain to me, so I decided to make a double stranded chain-type pattern instead. This took a little bit of fiddling around with to get right, though. First, I laid out seed beads just like I did with the larger beads.

Then, I got out a short length of thread and a needle and strung those beads on in that pattern. The two-by-two chain ended up looking a little too stilted and stiff for my tastes, though, so I tried again with a three-by-one chain and got much more pleasing results.

With everything planned out like this, I was just about ready to start when I had an idea. What if the size of the focal/accent beads tapered off at the non-loop end of the lariat so that it was easier to thread that end through the loop? I didn't have different sizes of my focal beads, though, so I dug around some more in my stash and came up with thematically similar surrogates.

Okay, now we're ready to start. With everything figured out like this, beading is very simple and actually quite a relaxing process. It goes by quickly once you have the pattern memorized, and I was at the end of my beads sooner than expected!

The far end needed no finishing whatsoever, but I still needed to secure the threads on the working end of the necklace and add a loop. To make the loop, I bent a gold-colored ring into shape and added a jump ring as a connector. Then, I just threaded the loose ends of the threads through a crimp bead and around the jump ring to attach it. If you don't know how to use crimp beads, there are plenty of resources out there. Suffice to say, it's an easy way of securing threads without having to make knots! The end of the necklace then looked like this.

And really, that was all there was left to do! Lariats are nice and simple that way: no need to worry about fiddly clasps falling breaking and spilling your hard work everywhere. I stuck the finished necklace onto my display bust to take a couple pictures.

And there you have it! This is basically how I make necklaces. Sometimes I use a bead board with curved ditches to lay out bead patterns, but other than that, you saw every trick I use. While you're certainly entitled to your own opinion about the end result, I personally like it a lot. So much so that I actually made a second identical necklace with the beads I had left over! I'm not sure what I'll wear it with: maybe it'll spice up an otherwise monochrome black outfit? The future is full of possibilities with this colorful piece!

What did you think of this pseudo-tutorial? Did you like seeing my thought process in detail, or was it a bit boring and rambly? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments! If people like this sort of thing, then I might do more of it for some of the other crafts where I don't follow a pre-made pattern. Regardless, I hope you enjoyed the break from yarn-craft as we move into summer. I'll be coming back to knitting, crochet, and the like shortly though, don't worry. Until then, stay crafty!