Crystal Chandelier Earring

One of my coworkers has a bit of a problem with the back of my bead embroidery pieces and no matter how many times I explain to him that this is the way to finish off the back of bead embroidery he still says well why don’t you cover the back of the piece with beads too. It might all be well and possible to cover both sides of a bead embroidery piece (not that I see the point of using up beads for the back of a piece) but in order to address this issue I just decided to give beadweaving a go. Kill to birds with one stone: learn a new technique and have the backs of the work covered in beads so he would stop going on about it! :D

The piece I am covering in this post is not my first attempt at beadweaving a piece together (I started with simpler bezels) but since this piece is made specifically for someone and I have to give it to them tomorrow I decided to write about this one first .
a few weeks ago a colleague of ours from our corporate offices asked me to make her a clear crystal chandelier earring and I said ok. Twenty minutes later she gave me a call and insisted that I should make the chandelier earrings look sexy too! Now I have no idea how to make earrings look sexy so I was a bit stumped at this point and to be honest with you because I had no idea how much she was comfortable paying for the finished piece I didn’t want to go on a crazy bead shopping spree (which I am really good at) and spend loads of money on crystals and beads. So I was very adamant on using whatever I had.

I was lucky to find some swarovski crystals in my stash that I had completely forgot about and put together all my beads in the clear and silver family in front of me and started to play around


I started this piece by bezeling the oval piece first. I do have to say I am really bad at finding out how many beads I need to start with so I went with a Ladder/Brick stitch technique I learned on the bead and button website to start the bezel for this piece which made it a little bit easier to do. It is frustrating getting the stone to sit in the bezel and not move around when you are trying to capture it in the bezel and this is probably why bead embroidery to me is still so much easier to do. At least with bead embroidery your stones don’t keep running away from you every two seconds.

Once the bezel was done I added a row of seed beads around the bezel to allow me to do the decorative edge. Nowhere is where the fun kind of started. I have never used superduo beads before and I was itching to incorporate them somewhere in my work so after each bead that I had added to the outside edge of the bezel I added a silver superduo bead. Once I stepped up to the top hole of the superduos , I started adding faceted silver beads which helped with the extra sparkle I was looking for and then I covered those beads by going around one more time and adding size 15 seed beads to give it a more finished look.

To make the piece in to a chandelier type earring I started adding the bicone drops on each side and the bigger crystal drop in the middle to finish it off. To me this was enough to make the earring pass of as a chandelier earring.
Now bezeling the square swarovski crystal on the top of the piece was a whole different story. I had so many problems with this piece I was ready to throw in the towel. What made it worse was that I was so engrossed in figuring out how to bezel the damn stone that I forgot to make any notes on what I was doing so when it came to bezeling the second stone I had no idea what to do again which made it even more difficult because I had to make sure that the piece matched the first one I had made so that both earrings would look exactly the same. I kept referencing my first piece and in the end I just had to try and make at similar to each other, as it was humanly possible


I have to say both earrings don’t look exactly the same but the discrepancy is so small that it can be overlooked. I have already shown the picture of the piece to the person I have made these for and thank god they liked it cause otherwise I would have had to redo the whole thing .i just hope that they like the piece when the see it in person tomorrow.

Anyway I hope you guys really enjoy this piece too and that it can inspire you guys to make something sexy too: D
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