How to Create Kumihimo Bead Clusters

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Note: This audio transcript is auto-generated and may not be completely accurate.
Hi, this is Julie with beadaholique.com i hemo braid that has no beads and then I've got these little clusters throughout which are beaded which is really fun and if you're curious about some of the other techniques shown in this necklace I do have another video showing you actually how to do the filigree accents but first I want to show you a couple other kumihimo examples so these are all standard eight warp kumihimo braids including this one here and they use the exact same technique it's just a matter of where you would decide to place your beads so that's really one of the fun things about kumihimo is it's the same basic process over and over again it's just you'd really change the look of what you're doing based upon the beams you choose the size and the placement and that's no different when you're doing kumihimo bead clusters as well so I'm going to show you how to do this now if you're completely new to kumihimo please check out our other videos showing you really how to get started with kumihimo i'll show you how to actually go ahead and cut your threads wind your bobbins and stuff like that but for the purpose of this video I already have some of that done so it is a standard eight warp braid now I want to get a spiral effect going like I have in my example and to do that you're going to have two different colors of cords four strands each and you're going to have the same color opposite each other so you see i've got the two teal to the left of the right of the sixteen as well as the left and the right of the 32 and same with the purple so they're opposite each other and i've already gone ahead and pre-strung my beads and wound my bobbin and I've got my knot with Mike weight and if any of this is confusing please do go back and watch some of our other videos showing you the basics of kumihimo so to do this we are going to just start by doing a basic kumihimo eight warp braid without beads now remember your beads are on here but you don't have to use them so we're going to go the strand that's to the left of the 16 with the card facing us a 32 up top up to the left of the top strand and the right cord down to the right and they're going to rotate it counterclockwise left up to the left right down to the right rotate and then I like to always just go ahead and secure my cords as I go and make sure my tension is nice and even so left up to the left right cord down to the right rotate left up right down rotate and this is all there is to doing a kumihimo braid it's really really simple it's very relaxing you don't have to think too much you can watch TV as you're doing it you can talk with friends as you can see I'm just talking in this video because it doesn't require a lot of concentration so you're gonna do this for however long you want your length of braid to be that does not have beads and whenever you want to pause just make sure you take one strand up here again left to the left so left it from the bottom up to the left to the top and then you can put it down like this because you've got three strands up top and you'll know when you come back to it and you're like oh where did I leave off wherever those three strands are they're gonna be a top and you're going to take the right down to the right so I want to show you something in this braid here I try to do it evenly in terms of my spacing so you can either just measure it with a ruler you can just have a little piece of paper that's this long you can do whatever to be able to get the nice even spacing here but you'll notice my braid here is starting to develop and what I'm gonna do is I'm going to keep braiding here off-camera until I get about this much braided and then I'm going to show you how to make your first cluster so I'll go ahead and do that and then I'll come back and we'll make a cluster I've done a little bit of a braid here and I'm going to create my first cluster I'm going to show you that technique and then I'm going to just give you some tips and just in general about when you are using beads with kumihimo or you are making these clusters so I've got my three strands that top at the top I'm just going to pull this one down to the right rotate and now I'm going to take my first bead and I'm going to slip it down the Strand and tuck it over that purple warp that's closest to it so it's just gonna get tucked under you want it to catch and then on this strand that's on the right again I'm going to slide a bead down into that well and catch it under that warp that it's closest to of the opposite color so it was the basic same technique that we do have left up to left right down to right but we just slipped a bead in there and now we're going to rotate we're gonna do the same thing here with the purple so we're just gonna slip a bead under and this two is the same technique for beaded kumihimo if you were going to do a solid piece of beaded kumihimo there's no difference so I slipped a bead under both of those again I'm going to rotate pull that bead up let it slide down make sure it catches and continue placing your strand into the slot where it belongs slide down another bead always work on your tension make sure your warps are nice and tight okay I slipped a bead what is nice about beaded kumihimo is you don't need as many beads so you can use a little some more specialty beads sometimes you know whatever you might be doing you can think about oh I'm only gonna need maybe 50 beads or something like that versus 150 all right so let me do one up to the top here so slip that guy under he's catching I'm going to pull that strand so it's secured I know where I left off and now let's flip it and see what we have so you can see we're getting a little cluster here and it is spiraling like our threads now at this point you just decide how many do you want to do so you see I've got one two three and then on this guy here for each spy-related four so one two three four and that made a cluster that's about that size can make it as big or as small as you want but I am going to do the four here for the example so we'll call that four beads tall I'm not sure if there's a proper term for it but I think that works fine again I'm just going to slip another bead see I need another teal and that's pretty green the whole time you're making sure that your beads stay put where you want them to be by catching under those warps no taint I think this might be my last purple one for this cluster I see yes so I just finish it with this one you want it to be even okay let's see we have a pretty little cluster and there's a little long if you wanted it to be a bit more ball like you could have stopped one bead sooner for you so it'd have been three beads tall okay so rotate and now to finish your cluster just go ahead and continue breeding without beads so even though your beads are still wound on your bobbins you're just not going to worry about them like before and this does go a bit faster than beaded kumihimo if you're going to do a solid piece of beaded kumihimo just because you're not having to catch all those beads each and every time see what we've got so you see you've got the braid to start with it's not beaded and you got the cluster and then you got the braid again and I just - a little bit more braiding and then I'm going to pull it off so you can see this example a little bit better and then I'll try to share some tips okay I'm gonna pull it off because this is just a sample for the video what I like to do when I pull something like this off if this was a finished piece I would take my weight I'd pinch my braid right up at the top take my weight pull this down a little bit and grip the top right there so that my braid stays in place until I'm ready to finish it and catch the cord ends I'm just gonna pull this off and then you see what we've got so we've got the braid we've got the cluster and then we've got the continuation of the braid right here so a couple things to note one is this weight is probably a little bit heavy for this particular project which is this project here you can see how is really pulling the S line I noticed it as I was doing this so weights come in different sizes I would recommend the smaller one if you are doing this s long because you'll see that my braid is really getting pulled and elongated whereas here where I did a lighter weight is more uniform it's tighter is not got this pulled look so that's one thing to note another thing to note is if you are doing these clusters you don't want to start with a cluster you always want to start with just a plain braid and that's so that when you go to attach your cord ends you can really fit the braid into the cord end and you're not worried about the beads trying to fit into a court in which could be nearly impossible it depending on the size of the beads that you use and speaking of the size of the beads you use you'll want to take that into consideration too you'll want to make sure that whatever material you're using is something that you can string a bead on to s LAN works great you might have a little bit more of a challenge if you're using something like satin rattail so keep that in mind and then also keep in mind the size of your beads because if they're too big when you start to do a cluster they're not going to fit through this hole so most beads on the market are going to be fine but if you want to do something really big and chunky you might run into trouble because you'll see this is not that big of a single bead but the cluster ends up this wide and then you'll see I've got a ton of bobbins here and they're all a little bit different so I got big ones small ones got ones are discolored bobbins and the discs you can use over and over and over again I've probably used these for three years at least so that's something that's kind of nice and you'll notice that there's a little bit of tape in here if you are using something like s long which is really thin and it pulls out of the bobbin too easily which just does happen especially if you have a lot of beads on it and it creates extra weight just take a piece of tape tape your end to the bobbin itself and then close it and that will create a nice secure anchoring for it so those are a couple tips that apply to beaded kumihimo as well as this technique where we are making kumihimo bead clusters so it's a really fun technique kumihimo braiding is very fun we have a lot of videos showing you different ways of finishing the braids showing you really in more detail how to do the basic eight warp braid how did you beaded kumihimo how to do kids these are kits that we have they're exclusive from beadaholique.com and we actually have videos showing you how to do these entire bracelets that's kind of fun so if that is something that is of interest to you please do check out all those videos as well there's a wealth of knowledge there you can really use them as a resource but I do hope you enjoyed this video here on how to make kumihimo bead clusters and have fun enjoy it kumihimo is a great technique for making jewelry you