Beading in Higher Doses

Beaded bracelets turned out to be great fun and an instantly gratifying project. One bracelet takes no longer than an hour to make, the materials are inexpensive, the possibilities - limitless. The bracelets make not only nice summer accessories, but also sweet little gifts for your friends and coworkers.

Based on the beaded knit bracelet pattern in the previous post, I've been experimenting with some charted beading. The idea is to create a stack of beads on the yarn - first in, last out. The most convenient bracelet size turned out to be 9 rows of beads and 49 stitches, which gives us 24 beads per row. 24 is a very nice number, as it is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12 and therefore provides flexibility for bead charting.

So, the first step is to create the chart. Here is a very simple one:


The crude lines on the sides show the path of the yarn. When threading the beads it is essential to follow these two basic rules:
1. Thread the beads, starting from the upper left corner of the chart, that is the last bead to be knit.
2. Follow carefully the path of the yarn through the rows of beads, otherwise you'll get a messed up picture.
This is what you might actually expect to get and some other ideas:







These I've knit so far: