The Crafty Crew had a lot of fun at Diane's last night creating stars using their bead stashes, upcycled jewellery, holiday purchases, and items acquired from the Middle of Lidl, with quite different results. That's where individual creativity comes in! Thanks to Steph and Caroline for providing the inspiration for this activity. We were also delighted to welcome Susan to the Crew. Our top tips for this make:
Use a cloth as a workstation base. You can lay out your beads to see which combinations you like, and it'll catch any beads you might drop during the make. Several of us were relieved we'd taken one of the tea towels Diane offered us!
Make sure you have enough individual beads - we worked in multiples of 6 or 8 depending on which star design we'd chosen, and our individual designs took between 6 and 14 beads per wire 'spoke'
Use small or long thin beads in the centre so they'll fit together easily
Assemble one wire spoke at a time, otherwise there's a high chance you'll drop lots of beads. This also provides the opportunity to check your chosen bead combination works
Allow plenty of space to turn each wire at the end using a pair of pliers. This also forms a neat place to add a hanging loop
If you're not confident to turn the wire, add a small drop of superglue to the end of the last bead. Hold the wire upright to allow some of the superglue to drain through the bead and so fix it in place. This option means you can fit another bead onto each wire
For the six sided stars we used pre-made wire stars purchased from Hobbycraft. The eight sided ones are from kits bought at Lidl*. We found the Lidl wires were slightly thicker and quite a few beads we had - especially those from charity shop jewellery finds - couldn't be fitted onto these. The six sided stars have more space between the spokes which allows chunkier beads to be used earlier in the design if desired. * = other suppliers are available and may list the six sided version as snowflakes instead of stars. Gill has kindly provided a supplement to our regular Crafty Crew meetings this month by holding a series of beginner's crochet sessions with varied results for those Crew members attending. Practice is definitely needed to progress this skill! So far we've tackled starting a chain; slip stitch; double crochet (aka single in the US) in rows with a turning chain; foundation/magic ring creation; plus crochet and increasing stitches in the round. The next step is to make a granny square. Look out for more on our progress in future posts with links to tutorials and information we've found useful along the way.