The Mermaid's Den

I made the base for this bracelet with peyote stitch and then added the blue drops around the edge and the flowers on the top. The large flowers are vintage Swarovski buttons I got in Paris. I also used one of the buttons for the clasp. For this bracelet, I tried tubular peyote stitch with different sized beads in order to make this spiral effect, aka Cellini Spiral . I really like this technique, but I thought the instructions made it sound more complicated than it actually was. It's just circular peyote stitch, and for each row you use three size 11 Delicas, two size 11 Czech seed beads, one size 8 seed bead, and two more size 11 Czech beads. For the starting row, you double the number of each. That's it.

One of my goals for this year was to learn spiral rope chain , so I spent a couple of weeks playing around with it. This was my first attempt at spiral rope. I used larger beads so I could see what I was doing, but after a few spirals, I didn't like the way it looked, so I took it apart. Then I decided to try double spiral rope chain, which I think I like better than plain spiral rope chain. I added bigger beads to the middle of each stitch, so I got a textured spiral. And another bracelet in a different color: The Art and Elegance of Beadweaving has a section on spiral rope chain and mentions several variations to try, one of which has size 15 seed beads at the core of the chain. I liked the small, dense spiral that this created, but you have to pass through the core beads a few times, and I found that size 15 seed beads are just too small for that--they kept breaking. And nothing is more frustrating than when your seed beads break and leave a hole in the piece. So I stopped work