To the Bone

My fingers.  Worked.

Well, not literally, but it sorta felt like it, figuratively speaking.

 I swear this took. For. Ever.

I say that as though it was unpleasant to stitch it; it decidedly was not. Each repeat starts with a fresh new length of thread and then gets joined to the previous one. They go fairly quickly and because I made so many of them, by the time I got to the last ones I'd made so many improvements in the thread path that the only pain in the making was caused by the cursed Deadline.

It looks more intricate than it is which is always a plus: impress the hell out of the muggles with minimal effort but also I'm always charmed when the same skeleton can progress in a number of different ways so not only is there this crazy bangle but there are two versions of earrings you could make to match it. And the simpler earring motif could be joined rim-to-rim to make a bracelet or necklace too but I ran out of time. And also? I wanted to finish watching Season 3 of Broadchurch.

 Somewhere in the middle of the stitching I took a break and made these cute beaded beads. Turns out that if you nudge the pinch beads to arrange themselves neatly in a circle, they pretty much stay there, probably because of the triangular cross-sectional shape of the beads.

I'm not saying that you need no thread tension whatsoever, but my suspicion is that crazy tight may not be as vital as I like to say it is. ("These are hollow self-supporting beaded beads which rely in large part on thread tension to help them keep their shape so I suggest that you work at keeping your thread tension very firm"). I think that's pretty close to my usual beaded bead schpiel when I teach.

Actually I took another break during the bangle and banged out a few pairs of earrings which I initially thought had to be made with drop beads but as you can see, rondelle beads actually work too. This is always one of my favourite types of projects to share since you only need small amounts of each type of bead so those tiny oddments left over from that exhausting project can be used up completely. Unless you have an odd number left over and then you're on your own buddy.