Beaded Christmas Tree

This project began Nov 2013 during a Librarian Trilogy* marathon with a fellow librarian, and was finished (after an 8 month hiatus) yesterday.

*Awesome films, well worth watching, Indiana Jones-esque.

We watched movies, we ate food that was terrible for us, and we thread tiny beads onto wire.

My first beading attempt - a bag-tag flower thing :)

I had done some beading before, but certainly nothing this ambitious, and it was very much a learning curve. We started out with the smaller top branches, threading the beads between our fingers, counting as we went and pre-cutting lengths of wire. Every step in the previous sentence is inefficient and can be improved.

-Don’t pre-cut the wire, just work straight off the reel.
-There’s no need to count as you go. Just load heaps of beads onto the wire and cut it when a branch is complete.
-Many techniques exist for threading beads; for these tiny beads, I personally recommend the ’stab repeatedly’ method:

v  Have a big pile of tiny beads in the bottom of a small bag

v  Fold back the lip of the bag to back a firm opening

v  Hold your stiff wire ≈6cm from the end

v  Gently fold up the last ≈1cm of wire ≈10° (to help stop beads rolling off)

v  Pass the wire horizontally through the beads

v  Lift the wire out, tilting upward slightly

v  These actions creating a digging motion

v  Repeat 5 or 6 times, and then push the threaded beads down the wire past your hand

v  I’m not sure I can be more descriptive than that, short of posting a video (which I lack both the equipment and technical expertise for).

v  In other words: Stab the wire into the beads and hope some of them are threaded on :P (much faster than hand-threading)

Kit from Coastal Treasures, Beachport SA

So ultimately while the top, smaller branches took ages, by the time I was 1/3 of the way through, I was working like 10x faster and the rest of it just came together.

The original pattern doesn’t have the bottom two rows of branches; I added these since I had leftover beads and wire. Although 17 loops on a branch is definitely the maximum, otherwise it becomes too heavy to support itself.

So then I added the decorations, made the star for the top, BROKE the star for the top, shoddily repaired the star for the top and finally attached the star, to the top.

14 beads for a loop, 7 for the gap, so HUNDREDS for a big branch

Close-up of branches

Oh and these beautiful flowers – a gift from a neighbour’s garden, just for doing a couple of easy but nice things for her. Karma rules!