Celebrating the Carrier Bead Craze

You know how much we love Carrier Beads here at JWD, so we thought that as International Beading Week is approaching it was high time that we put together a little blog post celebrating the versatility and down right FUN of these little rectangular beauties!

We asked members of Jill’s Facebook Group Jill Wiseman Designs Beaders to share their pics with us of their Carrier Bead projects, and we’ve collected some of our favorites to share with you.

Read on for plenty of Carrier Bead inspiration AND a super carrier bead offer…

The Carrier Bead Craze

The crazy wagon that is the Carrier Bead Craze has been steaming ahead for most of this year – and in fact shows no sign of stopping! Glass or even plastic carrier beads provide the perfect mold for beading over – enabling you to create elaborate beaded components that can be used in so many different types of jewellery.

Jaqueline Carrero’s colorful patterns

The traditional style of working with carrier beads is to use peyote – or even brick – stitch to bead a flat band that sits over the bead – such as in the great free designs we have available for download here. These can then be strung together into double strand necklaces and bracelets. It’s even possible to join two Carrier Beads together for a double width canvas to work on, as in Julie Semones’ bracelet.

Julie Semones – “My very first peyote project – thrilled with how it turned out.”

It’s not always about covering the Carrier Beads completely! The quality and shine of the Czech Glass Carrier Beads means that sometimes the best way to show them off is to accentuate rather than cover them, just like Susan Sassoon and Carmelina Calabrese have done in these creations.