Audio Transcript
Note: This audio transcript is auto-generated and may not be completely accurate.
Hi this is Megan with Beadaholique.com and today I'm going to show you how to make a beaded tassel will look just like that and you can use this for a pair of earrings or a necklace or decorations on pretty much anything and what we will be using to make that are Miyuki delicas in size 11/0 seed beads I have them in gun metal and then we're gonna use fire line in the smoke color to match that and I have the size B .006 inch and then we're also going to use a piece of black three inch wide Grosgrain Ribbon and the tools you're gonna use are going to be some scissors a size ten beading needle a thread zapper and then we're going to later on just use some E6000 glue and you'll need something to use to apply that and you'll also be using a ruler. You can any kind of ruler you have we just need to be able to make sure that your tassels are all the same length the first thing we're gonna do is cut a length of Grosgrain Ribbon you don't need very much probably six to eight inches which is plenty and we're gonna start by sewing a beaded fringe onto a piece of the ribbon and the ribbon will provide the base underneath the top part of the tassel cut a piece of fire line, you'll probably need to use more than one piece go ahead and start with a length that you're comfortable working with and thread your needle so give yourself a little bit of room you're going to work more towards the middle of the piece of ribbon start by going up-and-down a few times into the ribbon straight across. I'm going to do this to hold the thread in place pull your thread through. You wanna do this with a single thickness so make sure that your shorter end of the the thread is loose leave yourself a few inches of a tail and bring the needle back up so it's comes up through the top and just loop it around the very end of the ribbon. It's just gonna hold it in place you don't need to knot it. We'll glue off the end of that thread later. You just wanna make sure that if you give it a gentle tug it's not gonna come loose so when you start you're going to using a ruler for reference and you're gonna start just stringing beads you can pick them up individually you can run your needle through the pile whatever works best for you my tassel, the ends are two inches you can make it longer or shorter depending on what you want it to look like I'm going to string two inches of seed beads from the edge of the ribbon go ahead and measure it. It's good to make sure that they're nice and even. It will look much neater so I have a little more on than I need so then you can just take a few of them off when you have the correct length that you're looking for what you're going to do to make this part of the tassel is you're going to go back through all the beads starting with the second bead don't put your needle back through the first bead that'll just make them fall off start with the second bead and go back up through the row and make sure your needle goes through every bead, that you don't miss any it's okay to do it in sections go ahead and pull it you can't tighten it up later to go and get through the row come out the top gently pull it right and then you're gonna wanna make sure that it's all the way up against the ribbon but not really tightly so you can hold onto that end of that last bead there and just gently pull and it will pull it tight don't try to make it too too tight, it might make the tassel not hang straight but you do want to make sure that it's flush there so then you're going to take you're needle and you're going to go back up through the width of the edge of the ribbon and you want it to be next to where your first string of beads comes out just over enough that the beads will hang right next to each other, so it's a lot like when you do bead embroidery go the width of one row of beads over so insert your needle make sure it doesn't get tangled up start the next strand again string exactly the same length strand of beads and you can use a ruler to measure every time you can compare it to the string next to it, the important thing is just to make sure that you do you have the same length I got too many on, so I just go back through too of them and pull them off if you prefer you can actually count how many beads go in the length that you want it can be a little tedious to count them all but you'll know that you're getting an exact measurement that way and there's less trial and error so when you have you second length that's two inches, do the same thing that you did the first time skip the first bead and go back through they rest of the strand then pull it gently pull it tight until it's just at the edge of the ribbon and again you're going to go back through slightly over just the one row beads on the edge of the ribbon and you're gonna do twenty strands to make a tassel that's about that thick if you do less strands you'll have a thinner tassel if you do more strands it'll be thicker so just keep working the same way and go ahead and do twenty strands as your doing your strands when you run out of thread all you're going to do your is exactly as when you started it, just take a couple of stitches up into the ribbon and in trim it off and you'll start your new piece of thread just the way you started the first one it's needs to be secure enough to hold while you're stringing your beads and then after that point we're going to glue it it doesn't need to be a strong permanent thing so once you have twenty strands you're going to just take some stitches back up into the ribbon and make sure that they're all nice and close to the edge of the ribbon but not too too tight and then leave a little tail a couple inches and go ahead and cut that fire line go ahead and cut yourself another piece of fire line about four feet long. If that's too long for you to handle comfortably you can do a short of a piece, you just might need to finish it off and add a new one if you run out of room but three or four feet is plenty once you have that threaded, put it aside we'll use it in just a moment the next thing we're gonna do is a roll our ribbon into a little tube and we're not gonna use the whole piece basically take the end of the ribbon on one side and fold it over pretty close to where your first row of beads are and then you're gonna want that side of the thread to go about the width of the beads and then you're gonna go ahead and trim the other side about a quarter of an inch pass the end take your ribbon fold it in half just pass the end of the last bead and then starting from the right edge here we're gonna fold that under and grab the other edge of it so that it's sandwiched in there and then start rolling it up and make sure that your loose threads are coming up out of the top so they can be secured later and roll that and try to make sure that you don't have a lot of loose space that your ribbon is rolled tightly and you're gonna all the way across until you have a nice round shape keep the ribbon in a straight line so that you don't have a lot hanging out here hanging out of the bottom so that it look nice and lined up take your fire line and your needle and you're gonna go at the top corner of that little end there right through and leave yourself a tail of a few inches and just do a few stitches along the edge of that lip if you pull too tight your gonna pull this tail right out. For right now just pull it loosely go right through the middle of it down to the bottom corner as well then take just a couple stitches back up to the top and you can go ahead and pull on the tail to kind of tighten it all up when you get back to the top pull it nice and tight trim that and leave yourself a tail again and that's not gonna stay permanently of course but what we're gonna do next is trim these and glue them down because we're gonna cover this whole top part of the tassel with beads but we're going to glue them on, so it's okay to get things kind of gluey and sticky in there go ahead and kind of twists all of your loose ends up and the fire line is pretty good about that it will kind of stay if you twist it and then we're going to need a little bit of glue so take E6000 and put it on some scrap paper or post-it or something you can use a toothpick or any other applicator to apply the glue. I'm using a piece of bent wire, scrap wire you wanna go ahead and take a little bit of the glue and just plop it right onto the top where your threads are and you twist it down into the glue and get your finger in there and make sure that all the tops of the threads are coated with the glue so that it's gonna stick and you're gonna need to let that set up for a few minutes before you continue to make sure that you don't lose the ends of your threads into the tassel because that'll all come apart once that's setup go ahead and trim it at the edge of the top of the tassel To cover the top of the tassel we're going to need to string more of your beads take your needle and go through that the very bottom of the ribbon not at the edge, make sure you get some of the ribbon but along in that little border of the ribbon, right in there would be good you want it just enough to catch the ribbon but make sure you're not too far up otherwise you'll see the bottom of the ribbon and the stitching and go right through the middle and leave yourself a good few inches at the end and as we work along the top of the tassel we're going to be stringing beads, applying glue and laying the beads into the glue you want to make sure that you don't put too much glue on a time because the E6000 dries pretty quickly and it won't stick to the beads well enough if you don't let it if you let it dry too long we're going to work in small sections go ahead and string a few beads you wanna do maybe three inches to start with give yourself room to work with it okay so go ahead and get several inches of beads strung onto your fire line and then we're going to carefully put some glue onto the ribbon as you're working too you're glue that you're working with will get a little bit dried out make sure you have nice fresh E6000 when you're working with it. If it's half dry once you put it on your project it's not going to go on smoothly and you're gonna have even less time to work with it get yourself some nice fresh glue you want to put this on cleanly but don't be afraid to use enough glue because you want your beads to be able to kind of sink down into it a little take the glue and run it right along the edge of the ribbon and take your time so it's not going too dry so fast that you don't have time to it on there neatly when you come to where you have the tail end of your thread go ahead and get some glue where that is and aim it up push it down into the glue so that it stays out of your way like I said don't try to rush it only do small portions at a time so take your strand and I'm holding on to the tail end too so that it doesn't pull out and you're going to carefully making sure that your beads are altogether, that they're not spaced out like that along with the strand you're going to make sure they're all down towards the tip bring the strand around the top of the tassel and into the glue and if it doesn't look like it's all the way toward the edge you can scoot down a little bit, just pull it kind of tight and hold it into the glue and then you can just use your nail to very gently move them down a little bit you wanna get it pretty close to the edge of the ribbon so that it looks neat if it's up too high you'll see all your stitches In between every time you glue some beads down, you're going to want to give the glue a couple of minutes to set this is pretty time consuming but that's the only way you're going to get them on there looking neat and as you go along just be careful of the work that you put down until the glue is all the way dry they will be moving around so if you are worried about movement then you might want to do this in a few stages where you let the glue to dry thoroughly for an hour or too between if you think you can handle it you can give yourself just a couple minutes in between take some more beads from the end and keep laying them down when you get around to the end of the first loop you are going to start a spiral you'll take the next row and just put it right below the first row but use your nail to push it down so that you don't get big gap there between the beads and the edge of the ribbon you'll have a little gap, it's not really gonna be that noticeable and then you're just going to continue the spiral all the way up until you get to the top as you're working this to cover the top of your tassel with beads when you get close to the end of the beads on your strand go ahead and just string some more if you end up with too many you can always take them off the end when you get your beads up to the top of the tassel go ahead and put a hefty amount of glue on there not a huge glob but a nice even coating not too thin and you can go ahead as soon as you let your glue set up a little bit you can trim that last tail off that's hanging out at the top so we're going to continue this spiral all the way up to the top in a nice neat little swirl get all your fingers involved and just gonna hold it still or any way you can bring it around and push it into the go and at the top you wanna make sure that you bring it in so you don't keep it s cylinder, you gonna bring it into a spiral at the top so that it's smaller and covers up the top of the ribbon if you get a little bit of glue showing through your beads, a little bit is okay, try not to get a lot globbed don there but if you get a little bit you can always pull it off later you can use tweezers or just your fingernails and give it a gentle tug and it'll come off continue all the way around until you close that gap and if the glue that you put on the top starts to dry and not get so sticky go ahead and just put some more in and be careful you don't get it everywhere or on your beads one more metal push it down in the middle when the glue dries I'm just gonna put a tiny dot right where I want my beads to lay once you have the whole thing covered in beads while your glue is still tacky, you can push them in and make sure they're all laying nice and flat. And that it has a nice uniform look then we need to add a way to hang the tassel so I did this little beaded loop if you have any extra beads left on a string go ahead and take them off just go right back through the way you came on them and pull them off and you're going to go ahead and let this dry for at least an hour so that you don't pull your beads up when you attach your loop so after your glue is nice and dry take your needle and go through a couple of the beads closest to the last bead right in the little spiral there hold the bead down as you move so that doesn't put any pressure that you don't need to put on the glue that's holdng it down if you pick up any dry glue you just pull it off the thread then you're gonna pick up five beads on your needle you're gonna go through a bead on the other side of the spiral you want to try to get one that's going to give you a nice symmetrical hang over the middle go ahead and put your needle through the bead you can hold it down in place so that you don't put any strain on the glue until it's dried for about twenty four hours it's not going to be really strong so you don't want yank on it too much pull that relatively tight you don't need to pull on it too hard then you're gonna take your thread and weave it through a few more of the beads and you will tie off your thread just like you would any bead weaving so leave it through it a little bit and then you're going to tie that off and weave in the ends. And that is how you make a Beaded Tassel. Go to www.beadaholique.com to purchase beading supplies and to get design ideas!
