New Lentil Beaded Beads

I have a soft spot for lentil glass beads. Maybe it's because I like teardrop beads a lot too. I've been working on incorporating them into beaded beads for close to two years now, and it's been such a challenge to engineer a solid beaded bead structure without the lentils flopping all over the place! After many attempts (resulting in many ugly prototypes), I've finally come up with some structures that I'm happy with.

The first is about 16 mm in diameter, and is completely hollow. I've named it "squared circles" since the circle-shaped lentils form a cube-like structure, and I thought it was a rather quirky name :). I made three of these beaded beads for this necklace:

This necklace also features some of Melissa Vess's beautiful lampwork beads. I was happy to find that the high-luster lentils ended up matching the lampwork beads perfectly!

This design is so versatile; it also works very well with Swarovski circle pendants. Here are two in a pair of earrings:

The other structure is much larger (24 mm!) and was much more difficult to design. It took lots of work and experimenting before I finally constructed this design to my satisfaction, as the prototypes to this beaded bead were either too squishy, or so stiff that completing the structure was physically impossible. I named it "circle starburst," and made it into a solo pendant in a Southwestern color palette:

I hope to complete tutorials of these designs before the end of the year, and I'm working on incorporating crystals into the circle starburst design as well. I'm trying to come up with a special holiday deal for these tutorials, so keep an eye on this blog!