Tips and Tricks for Making My Beaded Handbag Tutorial

Since writing my beaded handbag tutorial, I've worked on a few more complex designs.  I thought I'd pass along some tips about how to deal with tricky areas of beading.

Any pattern that uses a single line of beads is much more difficult than one where the design is made up of big blocks of color. For the red bag above, I had to apply the background beads very carefully, so that the star burst, blue stripes, and gold arrows were not knocked out of alignment. The bag below, on the other hand, is fairly simple, because each block of colors dries to a solid shape that is difficult to knock out of shape.

This blue and bronze bag is the second difficult bag I've been working on. I've finished all the beading, but it still needs hardware. The only really tricky part of this bag was the "E" I added to the top portion. I needed to make the E as even as possible. I chose to work on the letter and the blue background inside the prongs of the "E" simultaneously. This kept the blue beads from knocking the bronze out of alignment but it also slowed me down a bit, since I had to switch colors every few beads .

When I'm working on delicate, symmetrical designs, I often pick through the beads to find the smallest ones. There's considerable size variation in most of the micro beads I've bought, even though they are supposed to be the same size.  I've circled clumps of the largest and smallest sized micro beads in the photo below. It's not always a big deal, but  occasionally that size difference is enough throw the entire design off!

 

If you've made one of these beaded bags, I'd love to see them!