Well, this week’s YOJP theme was to Try a Tutorial. I thought about it for a while and realized that while I write tutorials for my own designs fairly frequently, I don’t follow patterns very often myself.

I taught myself bead weaving about five years ago when the company I work for had a brick-and-mortar bead shop. My coworker wanted me to give some instructions she wrote a trial run and suddenly I found myself hooked. From there, I mostly taught myself with basic technique tutorials (peyote, herringbone, brick stitch, etc) and the occasional magazine pattern that I liked.

The last year or so, though, I’ve either worked without a pattern from previous knowledge or worked on my original designs. I do still get Bead and Button and Beadwork magazines, though, so I went there for inspiration.

In the newest Bead and Button magazine, I found a pattern that piqued my interest.

Discs & Drops by Janice Chatham

I really liked the shape of the flower medallions in this necklace. I also wanted to see how much I could change the feel of the overall piece by changing the color scheme and replacing the fancy faceted quartz drops with some casual, mottled Czech petal beads.

Well… I started out following the pattern precisely, but then I started tweaking the counts  a bit and fiddling… and then earrings happened. I used the connector motif to make a dangle for the earrings, and that was that. I didn’t technically follow the tutorial, no. But I ended up with some really sweet earrings!

We’ll see how next week goes!