Beading Class: Blanket Stitch and Friends

Since I am easily distracted, and since Thanksgiving involved a lot of cooking and stuff, I set aside my beading class lessons and one week crept into two weeks. So here I am now:

After doing a row of individually attached beads, and some little short strands of beads, I took my needle out close to the edge of my canvas scrap (but not close enough to make the hole break out towards the edge) and made some blanket stitches. I always have trouble visualizing this stitch until I've successfully started it, which generally involves looking at a clear diagram of a blanket stitch and mumbling to myself.

Once my awkward beginning was over, it was pretty easy to make this stitch around the edge, pre-poking holes that were about the width of my beads. By putting the needle in the same hole twice at the ends and adding a few extra beads I was able to get curved corners. The first stitches used two beads, then, towards the right side of the bottom, I experimented with some single beads, alternating with a double. I just used beading thread and didn't try to cover it, not wanting to get into the issue of which thread would work with which needle which would then go through which beads.

I then became curious if I could do detached blanket stitches in the middle of the canvas. I wasn't really pleased with the results (upper right of this next image) because it's difficult to cut across the end of a string of beads and add another with predicable results. So I started making things that were more like fly stitches, with a over-sized length of beads being caught up by a sideways length and pulled out of a straight line. Also I tried running two legs of small beads through a large bead center. The one that looks like an H, far right, is actually two strands of beads catching up a two hole bead in the center. I could see doing some interesting things with this.

Also, as seen in the two curved lines lower left, it is possible to make a detached blanket stitch by making an extra long strand, bringing the needle down leaving the strand to curve on top, and catching the curve with just plain thread, which you bring down near where you came out.

But these stitches below are my favorites. I did a run of about 8 small beads, added a large bead, and added a couple more small. I took the needle back in, leaving some play in the strand, then brought it out nearby, strung small beads, ran parallel through the large bead and strung a couple more before choosing the direction of the entry, making sure the strand fits tight to the string and bringing it back down under. These made random figures that seemed to dance.  Hmmmm, if I added a large bead in the fork of the "arms", it would look like the head of a dancer. Or I could even look for beads shaped like heads, or make my own out of polymer clay.

The rest are just more random views of the same area. I got tired of shiny and matte black so added some dark peacock beads.  I want to experiment with a few more techniques before working on my colored backgrounds with brighter beads.