Meet the Beadwork Before the Finished Peice

STG JOURNAL • VOLUME 1 • ISSUE 4

Meet the Beadwork Before the Finished Piece

When you see a finished piece of jewelry, you see the colors, the pattern and the final design.

What you don’t always see is where it started.

Before there’s a finished pair of earrings, bracelet, ring or hat band sitting in front of me, there are piles of tiny beads on my bead mat and an idea in my head that may—or may not—turn out exactly the way I imagined it.

And that’s part of what I love about beadwork.

It Starts With the Beads

Sometimes I have a design in mind before I ever pull out the first bead. Other times, it starts with a color.

I’ll put different colors next to each other, move them around, take one away, add another and see what feels right.

Turquoise might need black beside it. A soft neutral might suddenly need a little pop of color. Something that looked perfect in my head might look completely different once the beads are actually sitting together on my mat.

There’s a lot of experimenting that happens before the first stitch is ever made.

Then Comes the First Bead

This is the part of handmade jewelry that can be easy to overlook.

A finished design doesn’t appear all at once.

It starts with one bead.

Then another.

And another.

The needle passes through them, the thread pulls everything together, and eventually those individual little beads begin to look like something.

At first, you may only see a tiny row of color. Keep going and a pattern starts to appear.

That transformation is still one of my favorite things to watch.

Sometimes the Beads Change the Plan

Not every piece ends exactly where I thought it would.

I might get several rows into a design and realize a color isn’t working. A pattern might need to be changed. I may take stitches out, switch beads or completely start over.

That’s not wasted time.

It’s part of making something by hand.

There isn’t a machine producing hundreds of identical pieces from a finished template. I’m sitting at my bead mat making decisions as I go, and sometimes the beads have a way of telling me that my original idea needs a little adjustment.

Those little changes are often what make the finished piece better.

The Part Before “Finished”

I share a lot of finished jewelry because, of course, that’s the exciting reveal.

But I’ve come to realize there’s something pretty special about the stage before that.

The thread is still attached.

The needle is still nearby.

There are loose beads scattered across the mat.

And the piece isn’t quite what it’s going to become yet.

You’re looking at hours of work somewhere in the middle of becoming something.

That’s real beadwork.

One Tiny Bead at a Time

The next time you see one of my finished pieces, I hope you’ll notice something a little different.

Look closely at all those tiny beads.

Every single one had to get there somehow.

Each was chosen, picked up, stitched into place and made part of a bigger pattern.

That’s what handmade looks like before the pretty finished photo.

A bead mat.

A needle and thread.

An idea.

Two hands.

And a whole lot of tiny beads, coming together one at a time.

Until next time,
Corbi
Small Town Girl Beading