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Posted by Colleen Shirazi, Tuesday, September 20, 2005 1:34 PM (Eastern)
I'm putting this separately because it's more of a ramble than a tutorial.
I've rather enjoyed making jewelry. It started out as an impulse. I mean I've bought and worn jewelry my whole life, but I never made jewelry before. I always felt that you needed to take classes and invest in materials and that it was hard to do or that your finished pieces wouldn't look that good or be that strong, et cetera.
I think how the knots work is that the second knot closes the ends of the cord, so that the first knot can't get loose enough to go anywhere. When you put pressure on the first knot, there's never enough pressure on the outside of it to move the second knot.
I've tried three places for beads: Jo-Ann fabrics, Michael's, and a local bead shop. By far, the local bead shop has superior materials. Michael's has a lot of stuff but a place where you can choose beads individually tends to be cheaper and better.
I've liked using a lot of seed beads. These make the piece lighter and also less expensive. Another useful size, but hard to find, are beads slightly larger than the seed beads. I finally found some...round clear glass beads that had been "crackled" on the inside. I would have preferred plain ones but the size was right.
It's interesting to take children into the bead shop with you. Of course this works only if the children understand they can't touch stuff in the shop or spill the beads. Children have a remarkably keen eye for color and form. They can comb through hundreds of beads and find the ones shaped like cat heads with faces on them, or tiny fruit, or intense green leaves, or beautiful red fluted balls or tiny blue butterflies.
Making designs is good exercise for children. Less and less so, do we make anything from scratch anymore. With jewelry, you start from absolutely nothing and produce a finished product. You have to understand symmetry, you have to count out beads, you have to use design skills, shopping skills, you have to have patience, plus you have to use fine motor skills (tell me about it; as I'm getting older, my hands are getting stiff, so I wanted to do something that would make my hands bend a lot).
I was impressed that my son went from producing, well, horrible designs, to making something quite good.
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