Book Reviews
Fabulous Fabric Beads: Create Custom Beads and Art Jewelry
By Kristal Wick
Available on Amazon
Review:
Don't settle for just any bead when you're creating handcrafted jewelry. Make unique, one-ofa-kind beads from silk, muslin, or hand-dyed ribbon embellished with crystals, fiber, glitter,
wire, and more for show-stopping bijoux. Fabulous Fabric Beads combines beading,
scrapbooking, quilting, fiber arts, and mixed-media techniques to create lightweight beads
made from rolled tubes of silk fabric and painted or embellished with stamps and other
materials.
Author Kristal Wick shares her simple and highly sought-after techniques for creating basic
fabric beads, plus ideas for embellishing to achieve unique effects. Begin with a primer on
supplies, materials and tools, suggestions for ideal fabrics, and how to create surface designs
on fabric, including painting, dyeing, stamping, stenciling, computer printing, and foiling. How
to create basic fabric beads is explained in detail, from cutting, rolling, dipping, and drying to
how to create collage beads. Kristal explains how to use wire wrapping and metals and how
to incorporate fibers and embellishments.
All beadmaking steps are shown with step-by-step photography and use easy-to-find
materials from craft and fabric stores. Sidebars and tips plus bonus information on using
successful color palettes help the reader make stunning and personal jewelry. An inspirational
gallery of art jewelry pieces using the featured beads gives readers ideas to use beads in
ways they never envisioned.
Projects are inexpensive and use readily available materials or fabric scraps or even
materials that readers already have in their stash. No expensive equipment is needed and
many beads can be made with common components. Plus, beads can be created in just a
few hours, and all finished projects can be created in a few hours.
To achieve different shapes, Kristal also uses fabric to cover inexpensive wooden, plastic, and
resin beads. In her finished pieces, she combines her unique beads with commercial beads,
using simple stringing and wire techniques for stunning art jewelry.
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