When you love beads, it’s easy to buy more than you need. Plus, it’s always helfpul to buy more just in case, especially with handmade beads where they aren’t all perfectly uniform. The result can be quite a lot of unused beads of a mixed variety. Below is just one small lot of what I have, left over from repackaging.
Because they are so varied they may not be suitable for jewellery projects for which you need a good number of the same size and design of bead. Throwing them away is out of the question.
So I think of:
1. Small projects, ones that don’t require a lot of beads:
This bag from Ghana is accented with just one bead:
Sometimes even in jewellery pieces only a couple of beads are needed:
2. Projects for which I can use number of different beads:
The bag charms / key rings below are all made using a variety of beads.
With such a mix, I often wonder how I can get the various colours looking good together. I place them next to each other to check if they resulting effect is appealing or not. Most of the time it’s by trial and error! Keep trying until you get something you’re happy with.
3. I Create A Randomly-Designed Jewellery Piece:
I had only one tube bead to work with in this necklace. Based on the colours of it, I selected other beads complement it.
I still have loads of mixed beads but I keep them, confident I can create something with them sometime as long as I can think outside the box.
We have some mixed lot of beads which could prove useful for small projects here.