Don't throw away your scraps,
Make fabric beads instead.
Gather into a pile scraps of cloth, yarn, thread, & embroidery floss.
Wash the pile using your washing machine, sink or bucket.
It is the dryer that really creates a lovely tangled mess of color.
Pick out from your clean, dried stash a couple cloth pieces
measuring no more than 2-3 inches in length.
Roll the scraps in the palms of your hands until you have a
tight enough ball to actually PIN into place.
Thread your needle with an arms length of quilting threadand sew in and out of your pinned creation until it is stiff.
After I feel that my fabric bead is nice and tight,
I tie off & cut my thread starting back into the fabric ball
but this time adding seed beads.
If you prefer, add a string of glass beads to your ball
to create a tail.
You now have colorful fabric beads
for embellishing purses, books, clothing, art dolls...
THE IDEAS ARE ENDLESS.
Go one step further and add charms to the base of your fabric bead,
create multiples of fabric beads to turn into bracelets/jewelry.
8 comments:
Fingers inserted into ears and me chanting "lalalalalalala"
You truly are the biggest fabric enabler I know.
i am going to tuck this away for a future project, awesome idea, you fabric slut, you!
Another ingenious way (yes, I'm calling you a genious) to make beautiful things from what most people would call trash.
Wow, what a creative way to use scraps. I've done Needle Felted beads before but never scrap beads. I'm definitely going to have to try this!!!
What are my beads doing in your blog, you did a great job making my beads. Thanks for showing me how to make them. This girl is truly a fantastic artist. Thanks so much for our friendship.
your mermaid friend
mermaidmary.baker@gmail.com
More reasons why I can't throw away any fabric, even a tiny piece. I can't wait to try this. Love it !!
ooo-- I love these fabric beads ! good idea ! You and the felted balls on WHIP UP really have me going.....simmering....hmmmm.
These are great. I wanna try!
that is beautiful and such a wonderful idea! i have been experimenting with different ways to combine fabric and jewelry and this is just awesome!
A question: if you are stringing beads on beading wire (or anything that doesn't use a needle--including possibly 20ga wire for wire-wrapping), how do you achieve a hole through the bead? I can imagine a couple of ways but they'd result in very messy hole edges...do you have a quick fix for this that you don't mind sharing?
Thank you SO MUCH for your already-generous sharing of this lovely idea! I'm all about community-building and -thinking and -living, instead of being all secretive with techniques and information. Rarely is another artist in direct competition with total overlap on another's target market, and even if they are, the market is usually plenty big enough and changes so fast that, in the end, the advantages to sharing and becoming better artists (not to mention better people) far outweigh any income we imagine we might have lost to a competitor's sales success. (You can see this is my cause du jour, LOL. I have just been so shocked and saddened by interactions with other artists since I began selling my work again--nobody will tell me about area craft fairs, or their suppliers, or how to find local resources, much less how they made something. Sad; it seems they are letting fear control them at some level...fear of financial loss or business failure, perhaps, or maybe just fear in the form of insecurity about their art or talent or skill, and I wish so much there were something more I could do to build/sustain a supportive, positive zeitgeist here in northern coastal California. I'm sure open to suggestions!)
Hug an artist today! :-) Thanks again!
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