Beading Necklace

Never, ever, ever use scissors to cut your wire!

The wire will fray at the end and will create nicks on your scissor blades.

The horror! Could you imagine trying to string beads on that?

For a nice clean wire tip, use wire cutters.

~ Ava Arie

An advantage of using a slightly less flexible wire is stringing smaller beads more quickly.

Instead of picking up beads by hand to string them, try this:

Lay your beads on a cloth to prevent them from rolling around. Hold the wire a few centimeters away from the end and approach the hole of the bead.

Gently push down on the wire so that the bead tilts and starts sliding onto the wire.

Lift your hand up to let the bead slide down to your fingers.

Repeat!

Once there are a few to several beads on the wire, let them slide down beyond your fingers and repeat again.

Hopefully this tip will help you string beads more easily! C:

~ Ava Arie

An Aught is used to determine the number of beads of a standard unit. The most popular seed bead size is 11/0(“eleven-aught”).  The commonly known largest sixe is 6/0 and tiny one is 15/0.

Seed Bead is a generic term of any small bead and typically solid-coloured. The shape is usually round.  Its history can be traced back to ancient Native Americans and South Africa tribes.

In the modern days, they are primarily from the Czech Republic and Japan, China, Taiwan, and India.  Japanese seed beads are more precisely cut and more expensive. Delica by Miyuki, Treasures by Toho, and Aiko by Toho are well known. Czech seed seeds have brilliant colors and are less expensive.

A hank is textile unit of yarn and twine. Some bead manufacturers, especially from Czech, use it as a unit measurement. A hank is unit bundle of strands of beads, that are usually 12 strands of 20 inches of strung beads in each hank of 11/0 beads.  Different sizes and types of beads may be sold in hanks which have different numbers and lengths of strands.