beaded spiral bracelet 2536

 Another experiment using a heavier braided cotton line to make a simple two pass helix that is held together with cotton floss. The spacers are irregular glass beads culled from one of those "mass-o-glass" pots of beads found at Michael's.

These bead collections are about 30% unusable due to cracking, rough edges, and other defects but the variety of color, shape and sizes makes them perfect for use in these projects.

 As with many other of these cuffs the layout is done on a tube using thin needles to position the beads. The cotton floss is threaded through the cores of the beads and wrapped around the framing cords.

The loose ends are secured with green cotton floss using a traditional whipping or binding. This work was often done on the ends of hemp ropes to prevent the fraying of twisted cordage. Now a days synthetic lines are melted or burned to fuse the fibers.

This is a pretty flexible shape measuring about 8 5/8" (219 mm) inside circumference. The beads are all glass (no plastic)

Design variations: add more parts to the helix to increase width; Adjust spacing of beads; use single color beads; add whipping to the spaces between the beads; oversize the cord and use larger beads; infill the spaces with contrasting color beads.

design and photographs © copyright 2012 WhatKnotShop