How To Do Ladder Stitch Bead Weaving

SKU VID-0245
Designer: Andrea Morici
Ladder stitch is a basic off loom bead weaving stitch that is ideal for beginners. It forms the foundation of more advanced bead stitches, such as herringbone and brick stitch. Here Beadaholique's Andrea demonstrates the stitch, using Wildfire beading thread and Miyuki square beads. This stitch is often used with seed beads and Delica beads.
Audio Transcript
Note: This audio transcript is auto-generated and may not be completely accurate.
Today I'm going to teach you how to do a Ladder Stitch or it's also called Weave a Ladder. The Ladder Stitch is the foundation of several different stitches including Herringbone and Brick Stitch. So it's very useful and you use it on it's own. So to begin, I have a length of black Wildfire in the .006 size. And I have that strung on my needle. I have a pile of Miyuki cube beads in the 4mm size. In a nice lime green color so it could show up really nicely against the black. And I have a yellow stopper bead. So first, I'm going to string on my stopper bead which is used for almost all beadwork just so your beads don't slide off. And you go back through that stopper bead. So now that that's on there, I'm going to pick up two of the Miyuki cube beads and I must confess that I'm using the square cube beads because for the Ladder stitch very nice to have them lie side by side. When I use round beads like Czech beads they sometimes don't line up quite nice. So I'm going to use the square for that purpose. So now that I have the two beads strung onto my thread I'm going to line them up so they're stacked on top of each other. I'm going to take my thread, pass it through the first bead. Tighten that up and then go through the second bead and pull tight. I'm going to pick up one more bead. I'm going to go back through that last bead. So as you can see they're sitting on top of one another just like a ladder. I'm going to pick up one more bead. Go back through that last bead. Go back through the top once more. Pick up another bead. Go back through the previous bead. Go through the top bead once more. So that's how you weave a ladder. As you can see, you're going to have the thread path going through twice and then once and twice and then once and the opposite on the other side. If you have enough room in your bead. If you're not going to pass through multiple times, I would suggest to firm up your beadwork, to go through the beads one last time working backwards. That just secures the beads a little bit more. And that's how you weave a ladder. I made this bracelet using exclusively the Ladder Stitch with just a slight modification. These are actually tube beads. They are antique copper twisted tube beads. And as you can see did the Ladder Stitch all the way across and then back one down into the next row and then did the Ladder Stitch again. Back one and then down into the next row. So as you can see, you can really make some interesting stuff just using the Ladder Stitch by itself. Go to Beadaholique.com for all of your beading supplies needs!

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M
Mary
A great foundation

Clear and simple directions for the ladder stitch and how it is a building block for other techniques. What a great tool - this simple stitch opens up so many possibilities!