Friday 21 April 2017

Knitting with beads


I've just finished this beaded wristband, started yesterday evening.  We had a workshop on knitting with beads, at the Huddersfield branch meeting of the Knitting & Crochet Guild.  The workshop was taught by Marie, who had designed the lacy wristband as a quick knit for us to learn on.  She showed us two well-known techniques (well-known even to me, and I had never tried beading before) - first, threading the beads onto the yarn before you start knitting, and second, using a very fine crochet hook to attach each bead.  But the technique we actually used was a new one, which uses dental floss - of a particular type (Oral-B Super Floss, to be exact).  The floss comes in handy lengths and, crucially for beading purposes, each length has a stiffened section at one end that you can thread through a bead. It's a really clever way of adding a bead to a stitch, and looks much easier to do than the other two techniques.  There are tutorials on YouTube explaining how to do it: you can search for "super floss beading".

It was a very well prepared workshop - Marie supplied suitable yarn (wound into neat little centre-pull balls), dental floss and beads, as well as the pattern she had designed.  And she had threaded enough beads for the wristband onto a length of dental floss for each of us.  (On the other hand, I wasn't well prepared at all - the one thing we had to supply for ourselves was knitting needles, and I had forgotten.  Luckily a friend had a spare circular needle with her of the right size, and lent it to me.   
Here's my wristband in progress:

  

And here's the dental floss with beads threaded onto it:


  
Thanks very much to Marie for all the work she put in, and for a fascinating workshop.

2 comments:

  1. such a lovely and unique idea.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Glad you enjoyed tne workshop - your wristband looks great!

    ReplyDelete

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...