When it comes to sea and ocean themed jewelry, most of the bead artists like to incorporate shells into their beadwork designs. This summer I was interested in working with anchors and making a jewelry set reflecting my love for the sea and sailing.
An anchor is a pretty popular element in jewelry design. You may want to combine it with any other sea-themed element such as sea glass, shells, driftwood pieces and corals. Depending on the component, you might need to choose a technique to incorporate and highlight the element.
Anchors have a somewhat complicated shape for a bead weaving project. It is better to make all decisions and plan a piece ahead instead of experimenting in process of creation.
Bead Embroidered Bracelet
I don’t know why I had to complicate my first bead embroidered bracelet project and stick to small anchors as primary decorations on it. Somehow I am more interested in fresh ideas for bead embroidery rather than just bezeling around shiny objects, even though I never exclude such elements from my design.
The difficulties of balancing seed beads and anchors in the design motivated me to come up with more interesting ideas.
I created a simple way to attached the anchor without gluing it to the surface of the base material (in my case – Nicole’s Beadbacking ). I tiny piece of bead woven “fabric” made using peyote stitch technique became the attachment.
Embroidering with bugle beads took more time than I expected. Bugle beads require double or even triple stitching sometimes. I like the fantastic geometric effect they create, which requires more effort in positioning the beads though.
Anchor Pendant – Weaving Together the Opposites
Initially, the pendant was meant to be made in the same technique – bead embroidery. However, I changed my mind and decided to continue my experiments using bead weaving techniques such as CRAW and RAW stitches.
You can find free tutorials to help you learn these stitches in my blog:
[button text=”CRAW Stitch” size=”large” color=”extra-color1″ link=”https://www.svetlana.gallery/craw-stitch-basics-video-tutorial/” target=”_self”]
[button text=”RAW Stitch” size=”large” color=”extra-color1″ link=”https://www.svetlana.gallery/raw-stitch-basic-instructions/” target=”_self”]
First I made the frame using CRAW stitch technique.
Again, the anchor asked for a particular attachment method, and I had to come up with another attachment – the spiral rope. This beaded rope became the most flexible attachment I ever made.
Besides the spiral, I made several other connections to fixate the anchor in the beaded frame.
Half Tila beads served as the edge decoration for the CRAW stitch frame. I used RAW stitch to create Half Tila frame around the pendant.
I’ve searched for similar ideas, but couldn’t find anything like my pendant. Have you seen anything like it? Have you tried incorporating anchor components into your jewelry projects?
