Continuous Learning - Wire Crochet With Beads...

...or It's Harder Than It Looks.

I was cruising Ravelry a while back and saw this really cool wire crochet necklace with beads. Now, you know I've done knitting with wire and with beads, so big deal, right? And I have some wire and some beads. (I did buy a new crochet hook though, because all my crochet hooks were my mom's and I just don't want to scratch them all up with the wire.)

The pattern is very straight forward. It's actually more of a process than a pattern. It's basically chain 2, slip a bead. Seems pretty easy, eh? Let me tell you what I've learned.

1. It says 39 beads. String 39 beads on the wire. I already had this wire strung with beads because of another project I had done a while back, so I decided to be lazy and just use that. The problem was, this wire had about 100 beads strung on it. It was so heavy and hard to work with. Plus, I had to stop and count how many beads I'd crocheted on a couple of times. If I'd only strung 39, I'd know when I got to the end, because I'd have no more beads.


2. This probably would have been easier to start if I'd left a longer tail at the beginning. I didn't know that at the beginning, however, and fought with the first 6 inches.



3. I probably wouldn't have had so much strain on my hands if I'd rested the bead tail on a table (like my dining room table, which would've put the
beaded wire not too far below hand level. I think that might have made the process quicker and easier. Instead, I sat on my new couch and tried to let the beaded wire rest in my lap. But, beaded wire (with a hundred beads on it) is heavy and it kept sliding off my lap and creating a downward drag on my hand.

You'll notice, by the way, that I am wearing a skirt. This is my 12th day in a row wearing a skirt. Why? Not because of the Amish thing I mentioned before. No. Because I have decided I look like crap in shorts. Plus, our company's dress code won't let us wear shorts to work. So a skirt is how I keep cool.

Curiously, the dress code policy doesn't mention whether or not you have to wear underwear. That's unrelated. (Or is it?)

4. You should probably use the correct guage of wire and the same kind of beads if you want to get the same results. I didn't because, as I mentioned, this wire was already strung with beads. And I have a bracelet made from these beads that I thought would be nice to match the necklace to. But this wire was a little stiffer than the wire called for in the pattern, so that made the process a little more difficult than it needed to be.


I think I will try this again soon, using a finer wire and these amethyst beads. Now that I know how not to do this, it should go much smoother!