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Today I'm going to teach you how to do a Ladder Stitch or it's also called Weave a Ladder.
The Ladder Stitch is the foundation of
several different stitches
including
Herringbone and Brick Stitch.
So it's very useful and you
use it on it's own. So to begin, I have a length
of black Wildfire in the
.006 size.
And I have that strung on my needle.
I have a pile of Miyuki
cube beads in the 4mm size.
In a nice lime green color so it could show up really nicely against the black.
And I have a yellow stopper bead.
So first, I'm going to string on my stopper bead
which is used for almost all beadwork
just so your beads don't slide off.
And you go back through that stopper bead.
So now that that's on there,
I'm going to pick up two of the
Miyuki cube beads
and I must confess that I'm using the square
cube beads because for the
Ladder stitch very nice to have them lie
side by side. When I use round beads like Czech beads they sometimes
don't line up quite nice. So I'm
going to use the square for that purpose.
So now that I have the two beads strung onto my thread
I'm going to line them up
so they're stacked on top of
each other. I'm going to take my thread,
pass it through
the first bead.
Tighten that up and then go
through the second bead
and pull tight.
I'm going to pick up one more bead. I'm going to go back
through that last bead.
So as you can see they're sitting on top of one another just like a ladder.
I'm going to pick up one more bead.
Go back through that last bead.
Go back through the top once more.
Pick up another bead. Go back through the previous bead.
Go through the top bead once more. So that's how you weave a ladder.
As you can see, you're going to have the thread path going through twice
and then once and twice and then once
and the opposite on the other side. If you have enough room in your bead. If you're not going to
pass through multiple times, I would suggest to firm up your beadwork, to go through the beads one last time
working backwards.
That just secures the beads a little bit more.
And that's how you weave a ladder. I made this bracelet using
exclusively the Ladder Stitch with just a slight modification. These are actually tube beads.
They are antique copper twisted tube beads. And as you can see
did the Ladder Stitch
all the way across and then back one
down into the next row
and then did the Ladder Stitch again.
Back one and then down
into the next row.
So as you can see, you can really make some interesting stuff just using the Ladder Stitch
by itself.
Go to Beadaholique.com for all of your beading supplies needs!