Beading Books

I love bead books. Really, I love art and craft books. To be perfectly honest, I love books in general. But bead books are some of my favorites. I always find ideas and inspiration to make things when flipping through the pages. I own an embarrassing number and I am always checking out new ones from the library any chance I get. I like to learning stitches and techniques from the projects in the books but I like taking my own twist on things or branching off in a new direction or trying new materials with the ideas I get.

My favorite bead books are:

 1. Bead on a wire by Sharilyn Miller – hands down the best guide for getting started with bead and wire jewelry. Tons of basic techniques as well as more complicated projects to work on as skills grow.

2. Shaped Beadwork by Diane Fitzgerald – not a book for beginners but a great starting point for design. Lots of techniques for creating shapes in seed beads to use in any number of ways.

3. Art & Elegance of Beadweaving by Carol Wilcox Wells – All the different stitches with some basics to get started and lots of complex projects to hone skill.

4. Beaded Colorways by Beverly Ash Gilbert  – There are so many color books for beaders, many of them excellent but this is my favorite because it has so much freeform in it. It opened my eyes to combining stitches and colors in new ways. 

5.  Beaded Jewelry by Maya Brenner – A great starting place for making jewelry. A lot of information about materials and simple designs to get started

There are so many more great books. I would like to someday catalog all of mine and write up notes about each on for a review.

I also love beading magazines, little sources of inspirations that just show up at my door every few weeks or months.  Bead and Button has been my long time favorite (I have everything going back to my first issues in 2004 and many back issues back to 1999), although I like Beadwork as well. Both of these have projects ranging from simple to complex, focusing on beads and beadweaving. I recently discovered Jewelry Affaire and Belle Armoire Jewelry which are fun but more open to jewelry interpretation and less seed bead focused.

 I sometimes spend all my beading time looking at books and magazines and jotting down ideas. Often I finally settle on an idea, pick out beads and discover my time is up!  I am working on this in terms of allotting time to look and plan and time to actually work.