Follow me on Tumblr~

Hey everyone! Just a quickie post here, I have to leave soon to take my husband to the airport (boo). Just wanted to say I've made a Tumblr account! I take a lot of photos of my beadwork, but don't always have the time to write a blog post about every one, so I plan to use my Tumblr account to toss up the photos I take for anyone who wants to see them before I blog about them in detail here.

Do any of you use Tumblr? Let me know, so I can follow you :)

Happy Halloween!

Donut Tutorial

Time for my first tutorial! I hope someone finds it useful. Please forgive the blurriness.... I'm badly in need of a tripod. Let me know if anything needs to be clarified; I'm new at this tutorial business :)

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Note: this tutorial is protected by an International Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence. This means that you are free to post this wherever you like as long as you give proper Attribution (that is, to me, Jet Kosanke, and my website, malfaitluciu.blogspot.com), it may not be used commercially (you're not allowed to make money off it, that is, sell this tutorial to other people for money), and you're free to make changes to it as long as you also share it under these same restrictions (that is, you still give Attribution to me, you don't sell it, and you allow it to be shared freely.) For more information, click the Creative Commons link at the end of the tutorial.

By the way- NonCommercial doesn't mean you can't sell works you make using this tutorial. If you make a necklace, bracelet, or whatever using this tutorial, feel free to sell it- however, you may not mass-produce it, and the Attribution part still applies, that is, you still have to attribute the design to me.

If you're unsure if what you want to do is allowed, just ask me! I'm really pretty laid back about things like this :) I'd rather share my knowledge and discoveries for free so others can learn than charge money for my tutorials. With all that said, on to the good stuff! :)

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Click on any image to view a larger version.

This tutorial assumes you are familiar and comfortable with even count peyote stitch, stepping up in peyote stitch, and zipping up peyote stitch.

Materials:

• Favorite thread
• Favorite needle
• Size 15 seed beads (I've used three different colors here, you can stick with one color if you like)
• Size 11 seed beads (I'm using Czech and Japanese (Toho) seeds; I don't know how delicas would work with this pattern... yet :3)
• Favorite music
• A cup of warm tea or coffee (optional, but nice to have)

One last note: I am using a different color for each row of peyote stitch in hopes it can help make things clearer. Think of the donut having two sides that are mirror images of each other; a row of peyote in orange on one side will be matched with a row of orange peyote on the opposite side. It may make more sense to just look at the photos. Hmm.

First Step

String a total of 40 size 15 seeds on a comfortable length of thread (one 'wingspan' of thread is more than enough for one donut and a few rows of embellishment). I've used alternating colors here in order to highlight individual rows of peyote later on. This isn't required, depending on the colors and patterns you want in your donut, but this tutorial is going to assume you've followed this color scheme.

Needle through all the beads again to form a loop. Knot here, needle through beads until your thread is coming out a cream colored bead.

When you knot, try not to make your ring too taut. You want a little bit of wiggle room in order to be able to get your needle in between these tiny beads.

At this point I personally like to weave in my tail thread and snip off the excess just to get it out of the way.

Second Step

Begin a row of peyote stitch. I've used brown seeds for this row. See how they mirror the brown beads strung in the first row? This is the start of each side of the donut. Think of the cream seeds as being the innermost edge of the 'hole' of the donut.

Third Step

After stitching the entire row, needle up through the first brown bead added in this row in order to 'step up'.

Fourth Step

Add another row of peyote stitch, shown here in green beads. At this point I use my finger to form the donut around. You'll want the strip you're forming to lay flat against your finger from here on in. Just keep even firm tension, and press the beads down with your thumbtip every now and then.

When you get to the end of this row, instead of stepping up, you're going to needle through to the other side of the beadwork, so your thread is coming out of a brown 'up' bead.

Fifth Step

Stitch a row of peyote on this side of the donut, (here in green) mirroring the row you stitched in step 4.

When you get to the end of this row, step up.

Sixth Step

Now we switch to size 11 seeds for the rest of the donut. Stitch a row of peyote (shown here in orange).

Seventh Step

When you get to the end of this row, don't step up. Instead, needle through to the other side of the beadwork so your thread is coming out of a green 'up' bead.

Eighth Step

Stitch a row of peyote here to mirror the row you stitched in step 6.

When you've completed this row, step up.

Almost done!

Ninth Step

Stitch a row of peyote, shown here in cream. This row will form the outer circumference of the donut.

When you've completed this row, step up.

Tenth Step

Time to zip up! Stitch through the orange bead opposite of the orange bead that's in front of the cream bead your thread is coming out of. Then, stitch through the next cream bead, the next orange bead on the opposite side, etc.

When zipping up, you're going to want to use pretty strong tension; enough to get the beads to 'lock' into place next to each other. Don't be afraid to pull hard; just make sure you keep the tension even.

Eleventh Step

When you've zipped up all the way around, your thread should be coming out of the same cream bead that your thread was coming out of at the beginning of step 10.

From here, your donut is complete! You can knot now and weave in the thread end if you like.

Embellishment

However, the last row of beads added (the cream 11s) forms a wonderful foundation for further embellishment.

Here, I've added three-bead picots in purple using the outermost row of cream beads on the donut. The possibilities here are endless. Add crystals, pearls, hell, you could even use that row as a foundation for some right angle weave.

Use your donut as a pendant on its own, as half of a toggle clasp, attach a bunch of them together for a bracelet (I have plans to do just that soon :3)... whatever you like!

And that's it! I hope this tutorial was helpful for someone. Again, please let me know if anything is confusing or needs clarification.

If you create something using this tutorial, I'd love to see it! Email me photos of your work (with a link to your blog if you have one) to malfaitluciu@gmail.com - I'd like to create a gallery page on my blog featuring your creations made using this tutorial (or any of my tutorials) with a link back to your blog, too :) Don't be shy, let me show off your work! :)

Donut Tutorial by Jet Kosanke is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

Today I'll leave you with Neo in a paper bag. 

'Til Next Time!

Halloween, My Most Favorite Day of the Year

It's October, and I'm thrilled! Not only did I win a fantastic fall giveaway courtesy of the wonderful Skye, it's also my husband's birth month, the end of dreadful summer heat, and best of all, Halloween is my wedding anniversary! This Halloween will be our fifth anniversary (wood and silverware)- by silverware, I like to think that includes silver jewelry components. Is that a stretch? Haha :)

I've been absent from this blog, but busy busy busy with beadwork. I'll post the things I've been up to in the coming days (too many photos for one blog post!), but for today I'll show off what I've been working on for the October Moodboard at OTTBS.

The theme is turquoise, red and white, and I love it! It's a departure from the predictable fall colors scheme (we did that last month, and it was a wonderful send-off for summer). I still don't have an end result in mind for this month; but I didn't want to just spend my time thinking and not beading, so I delved into my stash (which includes some fantastic opaque czech 11/0s in rainbow colors that my lovely husband bought for me- just in time, as I had no turquoise beads, and I really felt this moodboard would be best served by opaque beads, of which I had none!) and decided I would pick a stitch and get really good at it. I have been a sort of jack-of-all-trades (and therefore master of none) when it comes to beading stitches, (aside from peyote stitch- I feel I have mastered peyote in all its incarnations). So, although I am very familiar with right angle weave, I didn't feel that sense of mastery, that I could use it and make it do whatever I wanted... so I decided to make these little 5x5 (I'm counting as a unit one round of four beads, the one that makes that pleasant little cross with the hole in it) swatches (I call them 'biscuits'!) Actually, they're not just 5x5- I suppose you could even say they're 5x5x1... in that they're not just flat swatches of RAW, but flat rectangular swatches folded in half and joined at the edges (did that make sense?). You can tell in the photo the ones I did early on and the ones I did later- my technique has been improving. :3 (I learned that for simple seed-bead RAW, doubled-up thread works wonders for form). I also used it as an opportunity to work out my own designs in RAW using graphs, and played with seeing how many different patterns I could come up with. Then I moved on to the Cubic RAW hollow square in the middle there. I love Cubic RAW. LOVE IT. And last, moving away from RAW, I completed the peyote donut. This is something that I have seen countless times on the internet and drooled embarrassingly over, but try as I might I could never understand it (and could never find a tutorial)- but then, magically, I just... did it.


And so, to celebrate this achievement, I've begun work on a tutorial for it (free to everyone, mind you). I remember the frustration I went through trying to figure it out, and if I can save someone that trouble, then I'm happy to do it. :) Cuz I love you guys!

As for the biscuits... well. There's no definitive plan for them.. yet. Perhaps join them all together in a sort of patchwork bracelet? Maybe some of my turquoise pearls in between each biscuit? Perhaps the donut acting as half a toggle? Hmm!

In other, more minor news, I also managed a very effective pattern for making 6mm peyote beaded beads. This was also discovered by trial and error. I will make a (free) tutorial for these as well. (I've noticed on all the non-english bead blogs I've visited, google translates 'beaded bead' to 'berry'. Or, people who speak other languages call these peyote beaded beads 'berries'. I've decided that's ridiculously charming, and so will be referring to peyote beaded beads as 'berries' as well from now on.) So, stay tuned! 6mm Berry tutorial coming soon!

For now, keep an eye out for my Peyote Donut tutorial, which I'm hoping I will be able to post tomorrow. Until then, here's Neo telling me it's time to get off the computer already.

'Til Next Time!