Spiral rope chain

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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 working on this one and started another.

For this one, I used size 11 seed beads for the core, and just went through three on each pass instead of four. I used two size 15 beads and a size 8 bead for the spirals. You can't really tell from the picture, but the spiral is slightly less dense than the previous one, but I think it looks good still.




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