Snow Maiden Bead Embroidered Necklace idea was born as soon as I saw sparkling white druzy stones at Portland Bead Bazaar in November. Don’t we all buy beads and stones knowing exactly what we are going to do with them? Probably not. Well, not always.
Snow Maiden is a character in Russian folk tales. She is a beautiful daughter of Mother Spring and Father Frost. I immediately was attracted to the snow sparkles of the druzy stones and saw how beauty and coldness of it resemble sunny and freezing days of the north. The name Snow Maiden did not come to mind yet.
A focal point for bead embroidery does not always provide the clear design idea though.
I follow several steps of the design process to make sure I create a piece close to my initial idea.
Designing Snow Maiden
Visualizing
The first step in designing a necklace is visualizing: I imagine colors and the approximate position of beads and focal points in the piece.
In the case of Snow Maiden, I only imagine a square element with a druzy stone in the center.
Bead Selection
The next step is to select or buy beads and other components that I might need for this project.
While selecting beads, I explored my design idea further and imagined combining different finishes of seed beads.
At this point, I contemplated using several different two-hole Czech beads for embroidery, but at the end, I left only one kind – Candy.
Embroidering Elements
After I stitched my first druzy element for the necklace, I had to re-create this element two more times. The goal was to make two exact copies of the first square. It was not as easy as I thought. The druzy stones were all slightly different in size.
The monochromatic palette of the piece made it easier to adjust the number of seed beads in each element without attracting too much attention to the differences.
Designing Bead-woven Components
Creating an element is not enough to design a jewelry piece. My next challenge was to connect all bead embroidered elements. I wanted these connections to be unique. I spend several days trying different ways to attach druzy elements and designed several bead woven connections. All of them looked interesting and fresh, but only one actually suited my necklace.
For the beaded rope I took my Fancy Spiral and modified it to make the right size of a spiral woven with the beads I used for embroidery.
Finishing Touch
When all the components of the necklace were ready, I realized I have no clasp that would go with my design.
Very often I see how the wrong clasp ruins a beautiful beadwork idea. I wanted this necklace to be perfect!
Searching and shopping online usually solves this problem. In my case, it took hours to find the right clasp.
The Name of the Necklace
When everything was done, and my necklace looked completed I started searching for the name. Occasionally, I have the name ready while working on the piece, but this time I decided to get help from Svetlana.Gallery friends.
After we played the naming game on my Facebook page, I picked a winner and named the necklace Snow Maiden. It was not the exact name the winner suggested, but a very close one by the meaning.
This is how the Snow Maiden bead embroidered necklace was created starting from the moment of purchasing beads and ending with the name of the creation. Is your way of making beaded necklace different or quite similar to mine?
