Last month I was rather delighted to see my second ever Mollie Makes tutorial published in their magazine! (Do you remember my first tutorial, the woven beaded necklace?)
This time I was asked to design a beaded purse pattern and tutorial, taking inspiration from the beautiful beaded bags and purses by Shrimps and Susan Alexandra. My biggest hurdle was not that fact that I’ve never created anything like this before in my life (which was SCARY!), but was actually finding ROUND glass crystal beads! LOL.
I specifically wanted to use glass beads rather than plastic acrylic beads because I wanted my purse to be fancy! Which did make it difficult. Not only are plastic beads much cheaper, but you can also find them in a wide variety of bright bold colours (which as you know, I am a fan of). But I wanted glass!
Glass crystal beads aren’t too hard to find, but they are almost never round! Argh. I spent hours trawling the internet using all kinds of varied search terms but kept coming back to doughnut shaped beads. Which are lovely, but just don’t work as well for the purse design as round ones.
Eventually I discovered that Beads Direct stocked round, glass beads in a handful of colours, and I chose ones that I thought would work well for my design. I mocked up my pattern on my computer, and then started to teach myself how to make it. Like I said, I had never made ANYTHING like this before so it was a bit intimidating, but I had to give it my best shot!
Little by little I constructed parts of the purse, and then many hours later I finished it (I did have to stay up very late a couple of times!). I had expected it to be a rough draft, but it looked so good that I didn’t have to make a ‘finished’ version, I could use the first one! Which was so surprising, and of course saved a lot of work!
I had to send my little purse to Mollie Makes for them to photograph for the magazine, and I was very sad to do so because I didn’t want to say goodbye to it (insert laughing emoji here!). I was so proud of it I wanted to keep it so I could keep looking at it :D
