Stitching Beaded Jewelry is one of the newest books in the The Absolute Beginners Guide series. Written by Lesley Weiss, the book is written for people just getting interested in seed bead jewelry making.
The emphasis of the book is off loom seed bead weaving techniques. It starts with an introduction that explains the basics of seed beads. The shapes and sizes, the sorts of seed beads you can get. One of my favorite things in this section is a photograph of a watercolor dish that has 1 gram each of different sorts of seed beads so you can see how much is actually in a gram. That's followed up with pages on bigger accent beads, findings,threads and tools. The rest of the basics section is information on how start your projects. How to measure your project length, thread your needle, how much thread to use and what various beading terms mean as well how to tie knots.
Then you get into the stitches. The steps are very well explain in the text with photos to illustrate. The projects are simple wearable pieces that are geared towards beginners to get them acquainted with the stitches. Stitches like right angle weave have a few projects so a beader just starting out can get a better idea of how different bead sizes and types can affect a finished look.
The stitches covered in this book are right angle weave, ladders, brick stitch, square stitch, herringbone, peyote and St. Petersburg chain. It also has some variations like circular brick stitch which is one of my favorite stitches.
This is a book that I can recommend easily to people who want to learn the basic techniques of seed bead work, or to people who have friends who want to learn. I can see using this with my best friend to help her learn how to work with seed beads.
You can get this book from Kalmbach Publishing Co., your local bead store, or below from Amazon.com (affiliate link)


Kalmbach Publishing Co. provided this review copy of Stitching Beaded Jewelry to me free of charge.
To learn more about BellaOnline's review policy, please check our review policy.