For a little break from bead embroidery I decided to learn
how to make friendship bracelets!
I had never made friendship bracelets before. It wasn’t such
a big thing amongst us when I was in school so no one ever bothered making
them, the only friendship bracelet I had when I was younger was one I actually
bought at a charity!
I looked up a couple of videos on Youtube and learned the
basic knots but I could not for the life of me follow the patterns and
understand the instructions they were trying to give. But one of the videos
mentioned something about a pattern making program on a friendship bracelet website
Since I really
just wanted to do basic stuff and I had already learnt the 3 different knots
used in making the bracelets I decided to give the friendship bracelet pattern
generator a try and that was probably the best idea.
The way the generator works is that you choose the number
and colour of the threads you want to use and then by clicking on the threads
you can choose the types of knots until you get a pattern you like and then you
can follow your own pattern. Now having said that I did get a bit confused with
some of my own patterns!! :D
I started with the basic candy stripe and then moved on to
the chevron pattern. Since it was my first attempts at making friendship, I
made one too short I made the next one a little too long, I had no idea how to
finish them off and I didn’t like the braiding and knotting method cause I find
it hard to knot it around my own hand without help. I made adjustable braided
straps and I didn’t like that either so I decided I was going to finish them
off with lobster clasps, which meant ordering some cord ends.
But knowing me I couldn’t just leave the bracelets be. I
just had to do something to them. I had seen some friendship bracelets with
crystal chains on them so I made one of those. Then I decided oh well why not
just do any sort of bead mixture. I can use up the odd beads I have leftover
this way.
After making a few of these I have learnt a few things: I
know how long I should cut my thread to avoid wasting too much of it, how to
make knots correctly so I won’t have holes in between the knots and also that I
need to buy a pair of rubber pliers for closing the cord ends because all of
mine came out scratched after I closed them with normal pliers and that is
unacceptable to me specially if I decide to give them away or sell them at some
point!
For a 5-inch long friendship bracelet I use about 40 inches
of thread with the cord ends and the chain extern added the length of the final
bracelets comes to around 9 inches in total.
All in all these friendship bracelets are quite cool. They
are really nice stacked together or mixed with other types of bracelets. I
usually wear a couple of these with some bangles, thin metal bracelets.
LIST OF MATERIALS
USED:
EMBROIDERY FLOSS
BEAD MIXES
JUMP RINGS
LOBSTER CLASP
Posted by Mana © BeadFeast. All Rights Reserved
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