Bead Addict After First Try; Some Polymer Clay Pendant Tips

Seriously. It is absurd. All I do is bead. And today, I discovered some exciting patterns (FREE) that incorporate crochet (to which I am a long time addicted) and bead stringing. Do you know how cool that is?!?!

Once I can stop beading long enough to take some photos, you will see what I have been working on. Below are some things I plan to tackle ideally today, but I know things will end up taking longer than I anticipate. Craft ADD. It is real.

I found all of these here, under the free patterns link on Interweave’s Beading Daily website. I googled “How to finish peyote stitch bracelet” and stumble upon this gold mine of everything beading. There are literally hundreds of free beading patterns. Here a just a few I must try…

Beaded Crochet Rope Bracelets

Polymer Clay Pendant “Chirp”

I am particularly excited about the polymer clay pendant, since during my “100 Days of Polymer Clay”, I made a truckload of pendants. Unfortunately I didn’t make a hole for passing string through (I usually just use Aanraku pendant bails to attach my pendants, or a jumpring). However, a cool thing about clay is that you can re-bake it repeatedly. So I can make a small rectangle from raw clay and glue it to the back of an already made pendant, leaving a “hump” in the center for the string to pass through. Then I can bake the already baked pendant with the raw clay “bail” glued on back. Don’t forget to use bake-able polymer clay adhesive when attaching raw to baked clay. Raw to raw polymer clay requires no glue.