Beaded Beads - Success at last

What is it about beads that I am so drawn to? Is it their generally diminutive size and scale,  and therefore their distinct 'cute' factor? Is it the huge range of materials they are available in; their wide colour and textural variety? Their cultural and historical significance? 

For me, it is all of these. We don't often talk about the last one, but beads have been in existence for literally 1000s of years. Isn't that amazing? Bead stringing has been around for so, so long - a length of days beyond my comprehension. They've been used as currency, to indicate social status and of course, purely decoratively for as long as human beings have had the inclination for any of these things to exist. Mind-blowing!

I have meandered through different sorts of beading since I was 4 or 5. From my Grandma's bead box (full of tiny repurposed glass jars, cigar and pill boxes and wee tins full of beads and sequins), to friendship daisy chain bracelets as a young teen, to an obsession with bead-weaving from ages 16 onwards, to discovering bead embroidery, stringing and wireworkin my mid-twenties, to art beads (they deserve something grander I'm sure, ART BEADS perhaps) in my very late-twenties, there's just something about beads that I love and feel I have a deep connection with. I'm not particularly crafty in other ways - I knitted a very little when I was wee (my mum is a master/mistress-knitter), but I've never done any embroidery or general sewing, crotchet, scrap-booking, cake-making.....I *have* made some of my own Christmas cards in the past, and there are definitely some crafts out there - screen-printing, (non-bead) embroidery, ceramics - that I would love to try. I tend to get very obsessed with one thing rather than flitting between though, so I suspect that with me and beads, it's for life.

One of the things I've been trying to achieve with seed beads for literally years, is the beaded bead - specifically, a wooden round covered with peyote-stitched seed beads. I can't tell you how often I've had a go at one of these and how sorry most of my attempts have turned out. I did manage a good one about 6 years ago, but I couldn't recreate it for some reason - left too long between the original and attempting to replicate it I think. 

However, last night, I sat down at around 10pm, determined to crack the secret. (Helen is currently away, and I am *appalling* at going to bed at a reasonable time when there is no one else to suggest that perhaps staying up until 3am will perhaps not aid me to feel at my sparkly best the following day...!) I watched two episodes of Endeavour, and ended up with these little babies. Of course, there are also a small pile of false starts and baggy, awkwardly covered beads, but now I am happy that I have a formula that works for me. I really am ridiculously pleased with them and am looking forward to including them in my jewellery soon.

The colourful ones were my first successful ones - I used three colours so that I could follow my stitch path more easily for subsequent beaded beads, but I actually quite like the way these three colours muddle together!