One of the patterns I like making most is a color gradation motif.

There are many different style of motifs you can make, but the idea is to take different shades of similar color beads and go from light to dark.

I love the effect!

Here’s what my latest color gradation design looks like:

I created a new jewelry making tutorial video that shows how to make this pattern. Here’s a preview of the video:

Jewelry Making Tutorial Video - Color Gradation Necklace

Here’s a new ring I weaved to celebrate the 4th of July!

You can see a preview of the tutorial here:

Preview Tutorial - Red, White, Blue Ring

I just finished a new video tutorial called Wavy Pearl Necklace. I used Swarovski pearls and silver lined seed beads.

It’s a pretty easy pattern to weave if you have some basic bead weaving experience.

Here’s a picture of the ring:

Here’s a link to a preview of the tutorial:
Wavy Pearl Ring Video Tutorial

When you learn how to bead weave a ring, of course it is important to get the size of the ring band correct.

This can be a bit of a challenge with bead weaving because there will always be slight variations in size of beads, and in how tightly you weave from ring to ring.

What you don’t want to do is finish the ring and then find out it is the wrong size.

There is a great tool called a Ring Stick which can help you avoid that problem.

Here is a short video tutorial showing you how to use a ring stick.

One of my students sent me a question asking about the best place to buy beads.

I wish I could just point her to a few websites and say “go here,” but in my experience shopping online you may not get exactly what you want.

I wrote an article which explains why I think your best option is to go to jewelry supply shows if you are demanding about what type of beads you want. Here’s the link:

Find Beads at Jewelry Making Supply Shows

There are a lot of stores both offline and online where you can find good prices on beads.

But the problem can be that stores focus on selling the latest trendy beads because they need to sell beads in volume to make money.

I have found that eBay is a great place to look when you want to find beads for a great price, or find beads that are a little unusual.

Here’s a link to an article I wrote which tells you a little more about how to use eBay to find great bargains on beads.

Find Cheap Beads Article

When bead weaving, you probably have experienced getting the left string and the right string switched.

There is an easy way to keep track of which string is which.

All you have to do is take two magic markers and mark the ends of the strings.

It can be a little messy so put the strings on top of the paper when you color the ends of the strings.

So you can see how this works, here’s a link to a short video tutorial where you can see how I do it.

Do you know how many cell phones were sold in the world last year? Over 1 Billion! That’s a lot of talking on the go.

Cell phones have become such an important personal item for many people that young and old alike have started decorating them.

Jewelry making and beading for cell phones is becoming more and more common. Take a look at some of these examples:

Cell Phone Jewelry Straps 1
Cell Phone Jewelry Straps 2

If jewelry making is your business, I recommend you try making and offering some cell phone jewelry. I think it will get more and more popular as we get ever addicted to our cell phones.

Seed beads can help you make very beautiful jewelry creations, but there are so small that they can be a real pain to deal with, especially if the pattern requires using a lot of them.

There is a product called a bead spinner which is a real life saver when it comes to stringing seed beads.

Here is a link to a video tutorial showing how to use a bead spinner:

Bead Spinner Tutorial

When people learn to bead weave, many become interested in wanting to learn how to bead weave various animal shapes.

However, most of the patterns are very difficult.

But take a look at this one. This is a very cute puppy face and all you need to be able to do is a simple figure 8 pattern.

You can put this on cell phone straps, earrings, or use it in many other ways.

Click here for information on the video tutorial: Puppy Face Video Tutorial