Go to www.beadaholique.com to purchase beading supplies and to get design ideas!
Hi this is Becky Nunn of Nunn Design
and I'm the guest designer doing this fantastic project
here at Beadaholique.com. What you'll need for this project
are some Crystal Clay, channel beads
and some seed beads and this is
an idea what we're doing with this simple technique of using the seed beads
while they are on the string embedded in the crystal clay
and then pulling the string out so you can create pieces that look
like this. For the first part of this project we're going to want to
follow the manufacturer's instructions and put the gloves on
and then you want to pinch off equal size balls
of both the colorant which is typically the color like this
and then the resin is the more beige color
and when it's in this raw form this is when you want to use your gloves
you want to mix them fully
until there is no longer any marbling
and sometimes it can be really sticky and stick on the
gloves but this one's not too bad
once it's activated and these two parts are mixed together
you have 90 to 120 minutes
to work with the clay while it's still malleable and nice and
soft, after that it starts to harden
and just like cement
I often have a wet wipe right by my
workstation because I don't wanna get any of the crystal clay
onto my findings side edges or anywhere I don't want it to be
once it's all mixed together
it should look something like this and it won't be marbled
Once your clay is mixed
you want to make it into a nice round ball. I'm also just double checking to
see if it's
marveled at all and looks good and then I'm gonna snake it out
into a rope about that long
start to wrap it around the core of the
bead and I'm just pushing it
down with my finger and kinda just scooting it forward like this
side action
that's what's making the clay move to the different edges. On this particular
channel bead
it has this little groove in there which looks awfully nice
but sometimes it's a pain if you get some clay in there so I'm just careful
that I'm not bring my clay too far over and getting it caught inside of
there and if it is it's no big deal you can get it out
just by picking it out with a head pin but if you can know an extra little tip and not
have to do more work later on, why not?
as you saw I got to the end there and I just pinched
off my access little bit and I'm just patting it together
to make it not have a seam right there, that doesn't matter much because we'll cover it up
with the seed beads in a little bit
at least we knew it was nice n tidy and neat
you might wanna check to see you don't have any
bulges like you have more clay on one side than the other
and if you do have a bulge and I do have one right there and
if you wanna just go ahead and live with it that's fine but if you don't wanna live
with it
you can pinch off a little excess of that and then just continue to
pat it down until it's nice and smooth and now that we've mixed this
extra clay you might want to check out the video on what to do with
extra crystal clay there's a lots of fun projects you can do with your excess
clay
before it starts to harden and you don't waste a little bit of it
so now that I have my channel bead all
nice and round. See what I was talking about
you wanna make sure you use your wet wipes to get that excess
off because once it's on there
it's on there and sometimes I'll even have some on my fingers and so it's getting
on there so I wipe my fingers off
too. Now using your strand
of seed beads. This is already on the string like this
you start to wrap it around
the channel bead, so I'm just lightly pressing it into
the channel bead and then I'm going to continue
to feed it along. If they start to get a little bit cattywomped, even that adds
to it a little bit of character so don't worry too much about having it be just right,
once you start to get to the other edge about
right there, you can see that you have it meet
right where it comes together you're going to press down
on that one and then start to pull gently
let's see how we're doing here
pull
you see that string is coming out. We had one little guy
pop off, don't worry, we'll get it on there but the rest of them we can just go
ahead
and gently press it down inside
and then once you feel
that that one looks good and it's all
in a row. I don't know where that one came out. It might have been at the end of this
string or
I think that lost another but that looks pretty good
you can still go back in and adjust them
using your fingernail to put them into place
and then you want to take your next
round. I've not done very many with this
smaller size seed beads. The samples that I showed you earlier showed larger seed
beads. So this I'm not sure how it's gonna
fit on there but you can go ahead and
mix up the strands like if you have some seed beads in your stash that are
larger sizes than other, you can mix them up
and do different examples
I'm making sure that my seed beads are pressed on the way up
on that strand, this little guy needs to come up to
the surface on the top parts. I can easily pull it up once I get
those seed beads on here
and before I pull that string out I'm going to make sure that
I have
them somewhat down inside of there
I'm just kinda going around and making sure that
they're kinda lined up and I'm pressing them slightly down into
alright
and I'm ready to pull. I have to make this special noise
that's the magic
the magic string noise
you just keep on patting them down and keep going
alright and then once you have all of the different strands
you just want to keep on using your fingers to kinda sculpt it
down and into place and sometimes your beads might turn on their side
that looks kinda cool itself, this takes a little bit of time and a little bit of
practice but
it is just so much fun and so easy
as you can imagine this would of taken for ever if we were
embedding each of these individually so I'm really into any kind of project that makes
it looks like it took me forever but it did not
I'm just going around slightly pressing them down nice and
into the clay. Take your wet wipe and then wipe
over the surface of it. Just to make sure that you don't have any
clay on the outside of
those beads
there you have a fun little bead core. So this is the part of the video that
is the Becky Nunn's dog-and-pony show where I show you some examples of how
I have used that seed bead technique on
other different projects. So on this one right here
I just used it all the way around the outside edge
patted down the crystal clay into the base
of the bezel and then I used those
seed beads on the strand. I just pulled it out
and I just so happen to have a bezel that fits perfectly right inside of
there
down here I did pull them off of the strand and embeded them
individually like you would with any kind at Crystal
these were on the strand and I want to point out
this is what it looks like when you don't clean it up off of your piece
sometimes it gets on there and it's really
really hard to get off
you can pick it off once it gets hard and then
over here I did the same thing as down here. I took it off of the strand
because it was a oval shape I wanted it to go
elongated and that was fairly fast to put it right inside the crystal clay
so again this is Becky Nunn with Beadaholique.com and I hope you enjoyed
seeing all of these fun examples of how you can use seed
beads on a string with the crystal clay
Go to www.beadaholique.com to purchase beading supplies and to get design ideas!