Not all beginings have to be difficult - earrings using bead embroidery freestyle

Are you enchanted by beads? Are you just begining your adventure with bead embroidery? Are you admiring different projects and telling yourself it looks complicated? Don’t be discouraged! Start with something small, not demanding and not time-consuming. What about earrings?

We will embroider the beads on a felt, don’t worry about stitches and the technical side of it all. You don’t need any special knowledge about embroidery to make those earrings. However if you would like to get to know some basics about beading you cn go here. Let’s begin!

Things needed:

Beading needles – in my case they’re size 10
Threads – I use Nymo in black or white colour depending on colour of the beads
Scissors
Beads – toho sizes 11/0 and 8/0 (opaque lustered white) and rocaille size 11/0, slightly smaller than toho, the colours are up to you
Felt – we will embroider beads on it, the colour is your personal choice
Hook earwires
Cotton wool – we will stuff our earrings with it

We start with drawing the shape of our earrings on the felt, we will need 4 identical shapes, which will be sewed together later on. You can trace the shape using other earring you have or do it freehand. To draw the shape I used a white crayon, but you can do the same with a soap. When you will do it and begin to cut out the shapes, REMEMBER to leave some space to hold on to while embroidering.

Put your thread on a needle, about a meter, and a make a knot at the end of the thread:

Now we come up with our needle from the back side of our foundation to the front, it can be any place or the edge of our drawn shape and then we pull the thread through:

Grab two beads, pull them all the way down the thread, line them up on the felt and then push your needle through the felt after the second bead and then come up from the back to the front again, but between those 2 beads and go through the second bead…

… voilà! You’ve just done your first back stitch 🙂 However do not continue your work like this, because we will make it much easier by freestyle embroidery – this is how I call the way of attaching the beads one by one to the foundation, it doesn’t matter where you attach the bead or in which direction the point is to make them look like they are scattered all around your earring. You don’t have to worry about the colours as well, just take your pick:

When you add the last bead, make a knot at the back of your work and cut the thread.

If you have all of 4 parts embroidered with beads we can begin to put them together:

Before that you have to trim the four parts close to the edges, but be careful, don’t cut the thread by accident:

We usually stick leather as backing to the back of our project to finish it off. We cannot do the same here, because we will put cotton wool inside. Therefore we will more or less sew together two pieces of our work. It is good to use a thread in different colour so that we can get rid of it when we finish. This way the two pieces will stay together while we will be dealing with edges:

When you put two pieces together and notice that there are places where the felt is sticking out you can trim it to make it even:

Let’s move on to finishing the edges of our earring. I will do it using beads but you don’t have to, you can use a simple stitch to sew the earring and it will also look fine – I guess it’s called oversewing. If you want to use beads anyway, just follow the below steps:

So again thread a needle, this time without the knot…

…grab a single bead:

go down through the felt about one milimeter from the edge in any place you want, pull the thread but leave a tail:

put your bead close to the edge and go back through it, so that it will sit nicely on the top of those two layers of the felt:

then grab another single bead and go through the same side as with the first bead within the width of one bead…

…this is how we will do the whole edge. NOTICE! always go with your needle through the same side with each single bead

Don’t sew everything around, leave some spice to put the cotton wool in:

Now you can also get rid of the thread which was holding together the two pieces of our earring:

You can put inside as much cotton wool as you see suitable, toothpick or some other stick will help you to do that:

If you are finished with stuffing the earring, you can continue to sew the edges together the same way as above. When you get to the end, you can go through the original bead and then through a few others to secure the thread: