How to Make Brick Stitch and Fringe Beaded Earrings

Hi, this is Megan with Beadaholique. Today I'm going to show you how to make these bead woven bugle and seed bead earrings and they have brick stitch at the top and some pretty dangly fringe hanging down. This is a really classic Native American design but if you change up the colors and the patterns you can make them look really pretty contemporary. So you can see here there's these these two different color palettes have a very different finished look to them. So if you play around with it you can make them look kind of whatever style you want to. And what you're going to need for this is I'm using bugle beads and two different colors of seed bead. So these are all Toho's. This is a size 11-0. These are the largest size, the longest size of bugles that we have here at Beadaholique. You're also going to need some nylon beading thread. Now usually for bead weaving I suggest using a braided thread but whenever you're going to have a tassel or a dangle on your beads it's better to use a nylon thread like Kao or Nymo because it's going to be more fluid and they're going to hang straight. Then you're going to need a four millimeter jump ring and an earring hook. And then I'm also using size 12 beading needles and you're going to need jewelry pliers and scissors or a thread burner. So the first thing to do is take as long of a length of beading thread as you're comfortable working with. If you can get it long enough you probably don't need to tie off and add new thread. If you're only working comfortable working with a shorter amount at a time then you may need to do that and we do have a video showing you how to tie off and add new thread if you're not familiar with how to do that. We're going to actually start with this foundation row of bugle beads. You can see here on both earrings here and this is just going to be ladder stitch and we do also have a video on ladder stitch. I'll show you how to do it but if you are confused by that then you can check out the video first. So go ahead and put two bugle beads on your needle and you're going to pull it down to a few inches from the end of your thread. You want to leave yourself about a six inch tail and then you're going to go back through your first bugle bead the same direction that you went through before and pull that so they go parallel to each other. Be careful when you're working with these bugle beads that you don't pull super tight because the edges on them can actually cut through your thread. So just pull it snug but don't really yank on it too hard. Then you're going to come back through the next bugle bead and you should have the tail of your thread next to where your new thread is coming out the next bead over. I'm going to pick up another bugle bead. So you're going to take either thread with your bugle bead and bring your needle back up the same direction through the last bugle bead on your foundation row and then down through the new one you just added and pick up another bead, down through your last bead the same way as you came through it before and then up through the new bead. Pick up a bead, go up through the last one and down through the new bead and your earrings are going to be as wide as this foundation row so you can make it narrower or wider but that's going to be the width of your earring. So the earrings that I'm making have nine bugle beads in the foundation row. If you want to have an angled symmetrical design like I have here you want to make sure and use an odd number so that your point has a center point. One more. Okay so this is going to be your foundation row and I have nine beads across. Now you're going to do the top of the earring up here and I'm using these crystal clear seed beads and these pretty galvanized silver colored beads and I'm using the crystal always right next to the black. As you can see I have, everywhere in here I have crystal next to black so the first row I'm going to do up here I'm going to use crystal to make that space between there. So the top part of this is going to be brick stitch and if you're not familiar with brick stitch you can watch our video on how to do that. I will also give you a quick refresher here. You're going to pick up two beads and then you're going to skip the first thread bridge and you're going to bring your needle through underneath the second thread bridge and then bring your needle back up through the last seed bead. For the first stitches here you're going to need to level it out and make it nice and straight so you're going to go back through your end bead and then back up through that next bead there and you can see when you pull that tight it straightens them out makes them sit flat. You're going to continue in brick stitch across you'll need to pick up one bead go underneath the thread bridge and then bring your needle back up through the bead and pull that down. Pick up a bead go under the next thread bridge go back up through the bead and continue across in that same way and you're going to go all the way across and put a new bead on top of each one of the thread bridges there. Okay and brick stitch naturally decreases by one bead every row so we're just going to go ahead and go with that we're not going to do anything to change it and we're going to get this natural point here. So the rest of the tip I'm going to do in silver and again when you do your first stitch in the row you need to pick up two beads skip the first thread bridge go back up through that bead and on this first stitch you'll go down through the bead next to it and again back up through that bead and from there you'll just do one bead you're just going to continue that all the way up until you finish your last row which has just two beads in it. So once you have your last row done with two beads you're going to grab one more bead go back down through that next seed bead back up and we want this one to sit sideways instead of up and down we're going to use that to attach the jump ring. I'm going to go ahead and reinforce it just go through those three beads one more time pull that nice and tight now we're going to go through the top bead then we're going to go down the whole side through this edge row here and then go ahead and go down through that end bugle bead. So now we're ready to do our fringe so the way we're going to do this is we're going to go ahead and just string each piece of fringe you'll go back you'll skip the last bead go back up through the bugle and back down. So to get this nice chevron pattern here what I've done is every first section of silver beads I increased one as I went down so it starts with one on the end and the middle one has five. So I'm going to go ahead and grab a crystal bead and then for this row just one silver bead and a crystal and then we're going to put in a bugle bead and I'm getting all this shape from just changing the top section here. These sections are all five beads in the middle so one crystal bead and five silver beads and then another crystal bead and then another bugle bead and we're going to have one more set at the bottom one crystal bead five silver beads and another crystal bead. So that's going to be that little piece of fringe here skip the last crystal bead and go back up through all the rest of these beads make sure you don't miss one make sure your needle is really going through each bead and you're going to go ahead and go through all the beads in that extra piece of fringe we just added there. You're going to hold the bottom of these beads and go ahead and pull that so that there's no slack so that you don't see any thread here but you don't want to pull it too tight because it's going to get stiff and it's not going to move nicely. Now you're going to take your needle and you're going to go back up through that bugle bead and then right back down through the next one. So this time as we move across we're going to pick up one crystal bead and two silver beads and another crystal bead and a bugle bead and then one crystal five silver and a crystal bead and another bugle bead and one more set at the bottom so one crystal five silver and one more crystal bead okay and again I'm going to skip the last bead and go back up through the rest making sure you get your needle through every bead. You're not usually going to come all the way back up through all of them in one go so just go ahead and go through as far as you can and then just go back in and you want to make sure that you don't get your thread all tangled up in there and on the other side pieces of fringe so so pull on the end or hold on to the end and pull the top until the slack is gone and then back up through that bugle bead and right back down the next one. I'm just going to continue all the way across you'll add one more silver bead in this top row here until the center one you'll have five silver beads and then starting after in this sixth one here you're going to decrease each one each time so that it comes to a nice gradual point so go ahead and do the same thing all the way across every time you'll string your beads skip the last one go back up just like that so once you've added in all your tassels you're just going to come straight back up out through that top bugle bead and you're going to tie in tie off and weave in both of your thread so once you have your ends all tied in then you're going to attach your earring hook so go ahead and I'm just going to open use the jump ring I'm not going to open the earring hook so if it's open a little bit go ahead close it up open your jump ring and you will usually have a front and a back so you want to see which side had all of your threads looping around at the top when you were doing your fringe and use the front side that doesn't have all that on it whichever side looks neater and you're going to put the jump ring right through that top bead then you're going to take your earring hook and close up your jump ring and you're all done