Tuesday, 18 December 2012

Kumihimo - a start

Last month I attended the Melbourne Bead show. I'm not really a fan of bead crafts, partly because I find it far to fiddley, and partly due to some of the hideous beaded 'fashion' items I've encountered over the years. Mostly I went to spend far too much money on seed pearls. I succeeded!

On my way out, I spotted a beautiful seed pearl necklace. It really caught my imagination as I suspect it was suposed to. Rather than buy it, I thought that I could just learn how to do it myself.

It looked something like this - simple yet lovely.

So, I went to the only store selling kumahimo kits and failed to buy the last one... yep, that's right. I stopped to browse some art glass beads on the way and when I arrived, someone had just bought the last one! -mutter-. So I ordered one and it arrived in the post a couple of weeks ago.  My kumahimo projects to date:

Created with 4 lengths of blue (3x strand cotton) and 4 lengths of red (3x strand cotton) embroidery thread. I bound off the ends in a loop with excess blue thread and attached both sides to a post. The blue beads dangle from a loop, thus the pendant is interchangeable. I suspect a single strand of a stronger cotton thread would work better (available in the wool section at Spotlight).

I may post instructions on how to do this simple twist pattern at a later point. I've been finding kumihimo is quite relaxing for watching the tv with and it's rather nice seeing the cord emerge as you twist.

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