How to Make the Deluxe Beaded Kumihimo Bracelet Kit with Pip Bead Focal

Note: This audio transcript is auto-generated and may not be completely accurate.
Hi, this is Julie with beadaholique.com in MO bracelets and they feature seed beads and tip beads just show you a couple different examples I have four different colorways I've got black and blue I've got purple pink and a green one as well I'm going to show you how to make the purple and gold one I think it's really pretty I'll show up well here on camera what's nice about an exclusive kit from beadaholique.com seed beads and these fun little pit beads with the kumihimo kids we do also give you the actual tools that you're going to need so you're going to get eight bobbins so what a bobbin looks like and we're going to I'll show you in a moment how we're going to use these and you're going to get the kumihimo disk as well as this instruction manual you'll get actual specific instructions for this kit but I do want to show you to get this manual which shows you a bunch of different projects as well which is kind of fun so the other tools that you're going to need that are not included are really tools just that you should have around your house like a pair of scissors some tape and then we are going to make a kumihimo wait this is going to help with the tension of our braid if you do a lot of kumihimo you might want to consider a kumihimo wait this is something that's very specific for kumihimo but if you're just starting out I want to give it a try I just made a weight with a binder clip some string and this is actually just a tool for my dapping set but you could use a bag of pennies or just something that has a little heft to it so without further ado let's make this bracelet first off we're going to need to cut eight strands of cord we're going to be doing a standard eight warp braid which means we're going to need eight cord links all about 36 inches long each I've done a lot of these so I can kind of just tell what 36 inches looks like if you are not familiar with that go measure it out it doesn't have to be exact it can be 34 to be 38 but just up around that number so that you have enough cord okay so we've got eight chords which are about the same length you can tell I wasn't too terribly precise because I knew I was allowing myself extra so we're going to take one of the chords and we're going to start to load it on to a bobbin so these bobbins pop open like so and pop shut and so to reinforce them a little bit because these beads can add some weight to the actual s lawn that can cause the bobbins to slip a little bit we're going to tape the tail end of the cord into the bobbin this is just a little trick I've found that really helps it's just something simple to do it's just extra moment in time but you'll appreciate it so just going to take standard tape slip it into that bobbin and tape that end into place now we're going to load up our bobbin with beads and for this particular design what we want is we want to load up 15 seed beads six pip and another 15 seed beads and you don't need a needle for this the S LAN is stiff enough and thin enough to easily go through the seed beads so I've got five six seven eight nine 10 11 12 13 14 15 okay now for the pit beads you'll see one side is more gold and one has more of a green purple tinge to it I just put him on randomly I liked that they were all mixed in the center you could try to string them all on the same direction but I just like I think they're really pretty mixed so I'm just going to go through the pit beads one quick tip is if you're having troubles going through the hole go ahead and just cut yourself a new new tip essentially to your s lon if you have a big eye needle at home you can definitely use it as well I'm twisting my salon a little bit to get them through these pit beads I've got four and I want six we go so now we're going to go ahead and add another 15 seed beads okay so then the pattern is 15 6 15 we're going to slide these all the way down to the inside of the bobbin and now we're going to wind up the cord so we have a tail of about 12 inches and snap it shut and we're going to repeat with our other seven bobbins repeating that exact same sequence I'm going to go off camera do that for a moment and then I'll come back and I'll show you how to set up your disc and start braiding so these are all loaded up now and they're identical so if we're just going to go ahead and grab their ends have them all line up and now we're just going to tie a simple overhand knot and you want that not to rest down towards the ends now I need a little bit more length on a couple of these so I'm just going to make sure I have that 12 inches or so of length okay these guys do like to spin okay I'm going to take the knot and I'm going to put it through the kumihimo disk that center hole going from the side with the writing to the blank side and then I'm just going to hold it down here and because these are all identical I don't have to worry about which ones I put where we are going to line up a strand to either side of all the dots so the 32 the 8 the 16 and the 34 if we had different types of beads that we were wanting to spiral it would matter which beads we placed where but because these are identical it doesn't takes a little bit of the effort out of this which is nice so one strand to the left of the 32 one strand to the right one strand to the right of 24 just untangling these as I go one strand to the left and there are little slots I'm fitting these into this is a foam disc so one to the left of the eight these don't have to be perfectly untangled you're going to be doing your non beaded braid to begin with so what happens right down here by the knot is not too important what's important is that you get these lined up correctly on the disk okay so and then the sixteen so I'm going to pull all of these tight so that not rests in the middle and then I'm going to attach my weight to it so from the underside I'm just going to pull on this knot a little bit and clip on that weight and now we're ready to braid and we're going to braid without beads for about an inch and that's going to allow us to have an area to attach our clasp to so the way you do this is you take the Strand which is to the left of the sixteen and you're holding the disc with a 32 facing you so the left strand goes up to the left of the thirty-one and the right strand on the right of the 32 goes down to the right of the 15 and then you rotate once counterclockwise and we're going to just repeat that same action so it's always the left strand that's on the bottom up to the top left and the right strand which is up top down to the bottom right and rotate and that is the motion this is all there really is to kumihimo which is wonderful and why it's so Zen like it's just left up to the left right down to the right rotate left up to the left right down to the right and repeat and we're going to do that now and we're just going to braid an inch without any beads and then we're going to start to add our beads oK we've got almost an inch braided and now we're going to want to start adding beads but I need to know where I left off on this braid once I want to come back to it with the beads so a little trick for doing that is take your left cord go up to the left but instead of completing this rotation taking that right one down just leave it up there so you have three at the top one at the bottom so I could leave this it can go any which way and I'll come back and I'll know that I need the top three ones facing me and the one single one down at the bottom and that way I won't lose my place so what we're going to do is you can see we've got this non beaded braided portion and have about an inch so now we're going to add the beads so to do that unwind your bobbin okay scoot all your beads off scoot them up towards the disc and rewind your bobbin and leave an amount that you're comfortable working with because you can always go ahead and you're going to need to actually is continuing adding more thread as you go and unwinding your bobbin a little bit but I like about that much anymore than that and my bobbins get really tangled one little quick tip is to add a little tape to the outside of your bobbin and that just helps to hold it in place so I add it right on the outside and then that's going to stop the cord from unwinding on its own and just due to the weight of the beads it can sometimes drag down the bobbin but that way they're going to stay in place now when I do run out of cord which you'll see will happen as you're braiding you just take that piece of tape off unwind a little bit Reeth a bit so that's pretty easy so we're going to do this for all of our eight bobbins so now we just need those beads on the outside okay we are ready to begin doing beaded kumihimo the beauty of a beaded kumihimo is there is absolutely no change in the actual technique between beaded and non beaded kumihimo we're still going to do left to the left right to the right rotate the only difference is we're going to start slipping a bead under the thread bridges as we go one at a time so what I mean by that is we're going to take our strand we're going to take one bead scoot it down with our fingernail can see it's coming all the way down and we're going to catch it under this thread bridge whoops to scoot it down we don't want to we just want one okay so now we're just going to complete our action like so and rotate so now left up to the left just as we've done before but we're going to add that bead and you add a bead every single time so we're just catching it under the thread bridge and completing the action now right down to the right but with a bead rotate I'm going to do a few so you can see what will start to materialize as your braid feeds through the center hole and I'm just slipping those under and I am making sure that they're catching because I want them to stay in place I don't want them to end up on the side of the cord still or somehow in the middle here you definitely just want to make sure they catch under that thread bridge but my technique has not changed I think that's one of the reasons why people really love kumihimo and I know it's why I love it because you can just kind of relax is not so much technical so many technical steps is really a very peaceful technique so do a few more and I'll show you okay let me do one more and then hold my place so I'm going to do the left up to the left but I'm not going to do the right down to the right so I know where I left off if you ever want to if this gets a little bit off-kilter you can always just pull your strands there we go so this is what we're starting to see which is that braids materializing with the beads and it will look like this and this pattern is created just based upon the placement of the beads on our strand because we loaded it accordingly we did the Pitt beads in the middle surrounded by the seed beads we're going to end up with this Center focal piece of Pitt beads so just continue until you run out of beads and then I will show you how to finish off your braid and how to attach the clasp and one quick note in case you're wondering when you do get to the Pitt beads you do not change your technique at all you just keep doing them as if they were seed beads catching them under the thread bridge and you just continue along your way so don't worry about having to do anything additional just continue along and you're going to end up with a nice long braid with a pretty focal piece after you've used up all the beads that you strung on your bobbin this is what your braid should look like and you see we do have that nice Center focal piece now to create the other end of non beaded kumihimo we're just going to continue the same process you probably got that from the beginning of this video but I did want to just show you again real quick so we went from beads to no beads and the whole process just stayed the same we're just going to do left up right down rotate and we're going to continue that until we have another inch or so of non beaded kumihimo we've completed all of our braiding you see that we have the beadwork in the middle with the two ends that do not have beads which will allow us to attach our clasp so at this point we're ready to actually remove the braids from our disc do that simply by pinching your braid up at the top and pulling all the strands out of their slots pull them through the disc as much as you can and cut off the tails so we're done with the disc and Bob is at this point now if you see the moment I let go of this the braid is going to start to unravel so what you're going to want to do is go ahead and take your weight that you made earlier with the little binder clip or if you have a Kumi weight and just pinch that end so that's going to hold the braid in place until you're able to finish it off so what we're going to need to finish it off is the e6000 that came with your kit also you're going to need some more of your s long cord your clasp go ahead and separate out your clasp at this point you never want to actually glue a magnetic clasp in place in the closed position just in case any of the glue seeps through you want to want to accidentally glue your clasp shut which we've actually done and learned the hard way so we're going to separate that out and now what I want to do is instead of using the esalaam that comes in the kit because I want you to be able to actually see what I'm doing on camera I'm going to grab a different color but you're going to be using the same color so go ahead and measure out 12 to 14 inches and we're going to tie off our end if you notice the clasp itself the diameter of the inner well is actually quite a bit wider than the diameter of your non beaded braid so when it's all finished it looks great because it's very nicely compliment the width of the actual beaded portion but this non beaded portion is a little bit too skinny for the clasp so what we want to do is we want to bulk it up and to do that it's actually going to be very easy we're just going to take that cut piece of cord we're going to tie a knot up towards the beadwork not on top of it up near it so this is actually going to secure the braid but we're actually also going to add some extra bulk here we're going to build up that braid and so I'm just going to tie a series of knots and you can do this by winding you can wind the cord around a couple times and then tie a knot you just want to keep it all centered down towards the beadwork and then you can go to the other side and tie a knot really whatever you want to do to bulk up this braid I find tying knots is it easiest and it also really secures your braids as well just keep in mind how long your clasp is so you don't want to be doing that up towards this portion here that would actually exceed where your clasp is because we're going to cut the braid here so I'm only going to show you how to do this on one side of this bracelet because it's the exact same method on both sides that you're going to be using but this is easy and doesn't take all that much time okay I'm going to do one more on the other side and then I'm going to call that good okay so at this point I'm going to go ahead and trim off my tails and I'm going to trim off my braid as well there we go now I have a post-it note you can use a scrap piece of paper and I have a scrap piece of wire I'm going to take my e6000 and I'm going to put a generous amount on the post-it note separate the clasp you're going to fill that well with the glue and be pretty generous in this I would say go ahead and actually really coat the sides coat the bottom you don't want the glue to seep out and onto your braid but you do want enough in there to really glue that cord in place there we go I'm happy with that so I'm just going to take the end and it looks all rough but that's all going to disappear I'm just going to push it into the clasp like so and you'll see it all just disappeared and now it's firmly in there and we're going to do the other side the exact same way you're going to let those both dry I would say overnight with the e6000 I would just play it safe let dry overnight probably a couple hours would be totally fine but you've gone to all this work so just go ahead and let dry as long as it needs to and then when you're done you're going to have a bracelet that looks like this I'm going to pull over the other color variations too so you can see them once again and all of these are exclusive kits by beadaholique you can find these on the beadaholique website and they are called deluxe buted kumihimo bracelet kits you