Bead Crochet for Any Climate

I didn't intend to do it, but over the course of about a week I wound up creating two bead crochet ropes that are climate based.

Not really. I just happened to give these pieces names that would indicate they're from different climates.

The first one is called Bonaire Blues, and I gave this piece its name because of the name of the beads - Caribbean Blues. The beads are Czech glass with a picasso finish, and they're beautiful shades of blue with a hint of green, just like an ocean reef. I've actually been lucky enough to visit Bonaire (an island in the Netherlands Antilles, which is where Aruba is) and scuba dive there. Because it's close to the equator, it's very warm there, but it's cooled by ocean breezes. The reefs are beautiful, too, with all sorts of corals and fish; and I even got to hold a seahorse in my hand on one of my dives.

Although it's shown here as a bracelet, this piece is long enough (48") to be worn as a necklace looped once or twice around.

And aren't those beads GORGEOUS?!

Just in case you're shopping for beads, these came from my friend Shannon, of beadsandbabble. She has a HUGE selection of Czech beads, lots of them with the picasso finish you see here.

The next climate-based piece was actually inspired by the recent snowstorms that hit the midwest and northeast of the United States. We used to live in Illinois, and I was following the weather updates by some of my Facebook friends. If we still lived in our house up there, I'd have been shoveling more than two feet of snow. BLECH.

It was while I was seeing all that white on the TV that I decided to make a bead crochet rope using all white beads. This piece is called Snowstorm, and it's made from three different types of white beads: opaque matte, opaque, and translucent. The pattern in the rope is very simple, with the three whites just spiraling around the rope from end to end.

I have lots of other white beads, too, so I decided to add fringe to the ends of this rope using a whole variety of glass beads. There are frosted glass, faux pearls, opaque, translucent, and cats eye in the mix, resulting in a lush fringe that's more than 3-1/2" long.







Now it's time to go outside and enjoy some of the 45-degree weather. I hope all my Illinois and Wisconsin friends are warm and safe and finished with their shoveling duties. :-)