Beaded snowflakes

Last year, I thought it would be nice to make beaded snowflakes as little Christmas gifts. Sadly, I had this thought on approximately December 22nd and since I don't do beads, I didn't have any of the things needed to achieve such a thing! So I promptly forgot about it. This year, I've had the thought a bit earlier so here are a few of the early efforts:





These are really very simple, no tools needed or anything. The large one is made with 2.5" corsage pins and the smaller ones with long dressmaking pins (1.5"). There's a decent size pearlised end on each sort of pin so that's the bead stopper at one end.

I've threaded an assortment of beads onto the pins - crystal clear/matte/crackle/AB in shapes from seed bead and bugle to druks (4mm, 6mm and 8mm), angel wings (8mm and 14mm), flower cups and faceted rounds. Just thread up six pins with the same arrangement of beads. I left about 1cm of pin with no beads on.

The sizes you want sort of depend on the length of the 'legs' I guess. For example, none of the round beads on the smaller flakes are bigger than 6mm but the 8mm beads look fine on the bigger decoration.

For the next step: tackle a fisherman :)

I've used 12mm cork balls for the centres. They're more usually sold to carp fishermen but I can assure you that no carp were harmed in the making of these decorations - lol! I've used a couple of layers of pearlised white acrylic paint over the cork and then just stuck the pins in to make the flake shape. I made a template first in Word so I could line the pins up along the spokes and get the angles right while sticking them into the cork.

A bit of invisible thread tied round the top of one pin made a hanger and voila: a snowflake!

Update: if you want more detailed instructions for these, Caroline has published my step-by-step guide on the Bubbly Funk website here: www.bubblyfunk.co.uk/article_info.php?articles_id=32