Hi this is Megan with Beadaholique.com and today I'm going to show you
how to do free form
bead embroidery
So this is
the kind of work that talking about and this piece that I
have in progress here
if you've watched Julie's videos on Bead Embroidery, she does a really good job of
explaining out the basics of how you
do
two bead back stitch
around a shape like a cabochon or a button
and
it's just concentric circles
and that kind of works so
the way that I'm doing this kind of bead embroidery is
kind of more akin to a crazy quilt
I have outlined
shapes
that I just sketched onto my foundation
with a ball point pen
and then I'm just kind of using the
basic two bead back stitch
that she shows you in her videos
but
in places I am
using whatever will fit
instead of
two beads in a nice circle so
it give a really interesting textural look
because it's all in rows
you can see
if you can see the detailed work in there you can see that
it goes kind of
this way, this way, all over the place
to wherever it will fit. I really like that
textural
effect that it has
I'm using Lacy Stiff Stuff as my foundation
you will need something
like that too
to Embroider onto
and I'm using nylon thread
and a size twelve beading needle
and this is something that's important, I'm using Czech
glass seed beads
and Czech beads are a little less uniformed in size
and that is really important
A lot of times in bead weaving I know that we're going for that uniformity but
in this kind of bead embroidery
it's really to have your beads
vary in size because you can find the ones that are going to fit in
to the
size/the opening that you have that you need to fill
sells this is a basic
overview of the technique that I use for something like this
this is not going to be a step-by-step
how to reproduced this because it's it's free-form, it really is
more of a jumping off point for you to find
the shape that you want to fill
and fill it in so
the first thing that I
would do is if you're going to use a cabochon
and here I used a large one and each of these little tiny
spots here is also a little
swarovski flat back
so you can
glue down anything that you're going going to glue down and then
I took a ballpoint pen
and sketched out
an idea of where I want the other lines to be
I'm going to start
for the purposes of showing you with just a little sketched out shape on
Lacy's Stiff Stuff
so
take a piece of
nylon thread
and your going to
thread into a size twelve beading needle
use about as much as you can comfortably work with at a time
and put a knot
at the end of your thread
and then they're gonna
come up from the back side of your foundation
to the front and just and pick a place to start
and then
just like in Julie's video on
doing tow bead back stitch
We're going to do exactly the same thing except instead of going around
the cabochon
we're going to follow
the line in our sketch
so grab
two beads
and if you haven't done bead embroidery I highly suggest that you watch
Julie's videos on that before you try this because
I'm not going to go into that much detail
about those basics
and she does them in her videos
So you're just going to continue
a two bead back stitch
along
the line you've drawn on your foundation
so you're just gonna keep going
just like that
around your whole shape, the whole
section that you want in this color
to be filled in and with something larger like this
I worked on this in sections, so first I outlined the cabochon
and then I did the outline of my flower and then I filled in the flower
and then I went through and I did all the lines for my swirls here
and then I worked out from there as you can see here I'm working out from there. So
the first step is going to be
to outline the initial shape
in a basic line of back stitch
and just keep going
until you're done with the section that you want to work on
Once you've finished filling in your basic
out line shape that you want to
start with, what I did
to achieve this kind of effect
was I went around again with another color that I wanted to use as an accent
if you don't want to do that just filling in if you want to do
more than one
layer around it you can do that
again this is totally free form so it's very much up to you
what I'm going to do is
use another color now to go in
and just fill in
so
to start with I'm going to
just like you would around a cabochon I'm going to just
out line this again
I'm going to work
in just a small part in here
so that I can show you more quickly how you would do it but
probably if I was going to the whole piece I would just
take my next color
and go around the edges around outline
over and over again
or once and then fill in a linear pattern
whichever way you want to do it but
I'm gonna work
from the same point that I ended at so I'm not gonna break my thread. I'm just going to
keep going with it
and I'm going to
just
come out next to
my row of beads here
and continue
with the two bead back stitch
right next to it
and
as you do these irregular shapes
If you run across a problem that your beads are not quite filling in
all the gaps
this is
where is this kind of Bead Embroidery is different is that
your going to
end up
placing beads of different sizes
in whatever you need to
you can see as I'm going along because this is such a tight curve here
it's leaving alone gap
right there between
this row and this line here
so what I'm gonna do is actually
put my needle
along the edge there
I'm going to look for a slightly
more narrow bead
in this green color to try to fill that in
here's one that's
nice and narrow
again that's why you want the
less
consistent beads, you want to use czech seed beads instead of like a
delica
so you can see
I just filled in that little spot
and you can
do that as you go or you can go back and do it all at the end
If I see a spot that I know is gonna need it go ahead and
get it done right away
and then go ahead and just
fill up
this whole section
with a second layer
okay so as you come
around
and outline the shape again
you gonna come
to places as you work
that have
all kinds of little corners and crevasses
you can see in
a larger example of this type of bead embroidery
that as you fill in you might go around once and then
then start working up and down this way or this way or across
and as you do that you're gonna come to a lot of spaces
that look like
this or some other variation of this
where you don't want to just keep going with both rows because you're going to run out of
space
and
working in this fashion where it ends up
with this kind of texture to it
all it is totally free formed
when I get to a space
that's tight like that all I do
is kind of play tetris with the beads. I'm just going to figure out
how to fit beads in there
so that they fill up that space nicely without crowding. Without leaving a lot of
empty
foundation space showing
that will involve
using different
sizes of the beads
it will also involve
how many go across and which way you're going to put them
which like I said that's how you end up with them
kind of
all different ways which I really like the texture in the way that that looks at the
end
I think it's a perfectly fine way to do it and
all you're going to do
is
look at
how you can fit beads in there so
I can't fit
these beads continuing in a V
and even if I do just one it will leave a gap over there but I do think I can fit
two beads going that way across
instead
so I'm just gonna fit them in the way that I think they'll work
and I wanna make sure that I don't choose really
wide beads or else they won't fit
those
do fit in there
and then I have this little teeny spot left right there and I'm just gonna put
one more bead going
this way across the bead
I'm going to put my thread across that way. You just want to look and see at the shape you have to
to fill
and then
find a bead that you think will fill it. It's a lot like doing a puzzle
As you can see it does move around the beads a little bit
when you fill them in
so just try to move them back
to where you had them
and keep your shapes
true to how you wanted the shapes
and that's also another reason to try to find ones that will fit the best that
you can find because
that will keep your shapes from getting really distorted but
you can see there I filled in that little pointed
spot in there
pretty well
it moved the shape out a little bit and that's gonna happen so you can kind of
expect it. It is
like I said it is a free form look
and it is going to give it
that kind of crazy quilt texture
and pattern. You can expect it to do a little bit
From here all you would do is decide if you want
to stay with this color or to chose a different bead
and
you can go around again in another row or you can start working across like
this if you want it to look like that
it's really up to you and your creativity and
how you want
it to look at the end but this is the basic technique
for achieving
this kind of a look