Paper Bead Tutorial : Bead shapes

I have been experimenting with paper beads and would like to share what I have learnt. I am working my way with writing tutorials so if you find gaps in my explanation, please ask me questions and I will try to answer them.

My intention is to have 2 parts to the bead making tutorial. The first part will focus on bead shapes and how you can get different shapes. The second part will show how to get the patterns and designs on beads. I will additionally discuss about hardening the bead and making it water resistant.

It is possible to make paper beads of varied shapes and the factors impacting the shape are

• the shape of the paper strip
• the width of the paper
• the length of the paper strip
• the thickness of the paper

The basic principle is that the shorter or thinner the paper, the slimmer the bead from the core (cylindrical) and the longer or thicker the paper, the fatter the bead is from the core (rounder or saucer shaped). The width of the paper strip in addition to the above factors, impacts the shape of the bead. 

If I have confused you enough and you are on the verge of leaving the page, just hang on because I am going to explain with pictures what I mean by the above statements.

Here are some basic shaped beads.

Fig. 1: Basic shapes

Fig. 2: Round Beads and Dumble Beads

Round Beads and Dumble Beads.

The two beads on the top row and right and the small bead on top row left are circular beads. The white blue and purple bead in the top row is cylindrical but looks round as the hole in the bead is very thick.

The dumble shaped beads look like two similar shaped beads joined together.

Fig. 3: Cylinder Beads

Cylindrical Beads. 

These are made with rectangular paper. The tiny blue cylinder on the right is the regular tight coil made with a quilling strip.

Fig. 4: Conical Beads

Conical beads.

The blue white and multi coloured beads here are conical beads. These taper down as a cone.

Fig. 5: Long beads and Saucer beads

Long Beads and Saucer Beads.

The three beads on the right bottom are long beads with the thickness of the bead less than its length. The green and purple bead on the left is a saucer bead. Here the thickness of the bead outwards from the centre is larger than the width of the bead.

Now on to the details of how these varied shapes can be made.

Fig. 6: Paper marked for cutting

Here I have taken a used A4 paper and I first drew parallel lines along the longer edge of the paper making long rectangles. On this paper you can see rectangles of width 2 cm, 1 cm and 1/2 cm from left to right. Next I drew diagonal lines across each rectangle dividing the rectangle into triangles. You can see that a few of the rectangles on the right still don't have the diagonal line drawn.

Fig. 7: The cut triangles

Next I cut out the triangles using scissors. I used scissors for this tutorial but normally I just use my paper cutter and the scale on it to directly cut out the triangles. That saves me the previous step.

Here you can see the triangles of three different widths and same lengths.

Fig. 8: Bead rolling tool

I use a home made bead rolling tool for rolling the beads. It is basically a grill stick with a rolled paper in the centre to make a handle. I have slit the stick at one end to make a slot but I tend to use the side with out the slot using it as a needle tool.

I some times also use a tooth pick for making the beads but I find  the hole size made with a grill stick more appropriate.

Fig. 9: Bead shapes comparision

Here you can see the different shapes of beads made with different widths of paper. 

On the left, the beads are made with 2 cm thick strips. The ones in the centre are made with 1 cm thick strips and the ones on the right are made with 1/2 cm thick strips.

Since we used the same paper for all the beads, we have paper strips of same thickness. To make different shaped beads using this paper, I have stacked multiple papers increasing the thickness of the paper and have used that for making the different beads.

Fig. 10: Beads with 2 cm wide paper

Here you can see that the beads are getting fatter from bottom to top tending from a long shaped bead to a more rounder shaped bead.

The bead on the bottom is made with a single strip of paper. The one above it with 2 strips piled together and rolled. the next one is with 3 strips together and the top one with 4 strips. 

Note that you cannot join the strips end to end as in quilling as the shape of the paper is not rectangular. So you will have to pile them together. 

The length of the paper used is about 30 cm. We would have got a bead of similar thickness as the second bead from bottom had we used a paper strip that was 2 cm wide and 60 cm long. The only difference would be that the layers would be more closer and giving a neater effect. But getting hold of a longer paper and cutting the longer paper is more effort. So the choice is yours if you prefer a longer paper of pile more shorter papers.

I think we would get a perfectly round bead with 6 or 7 strips piled together. It is always a good idea to experiment with the paper you are going to use for your project and when you get the perfect shape you want, you make the rest of the beads using the same number of strips.

Fig. 11: Beads with 1 cm wide paper

Here again the beads are getting thicker to bottom to top. I have used one strip for the bottom bead, 2 for the middle one and 4 for the top one. 

You can see that since the width of the paper is 1 cm, we get a rounder bead with lesser number of strips compared to the strip that was 2 cm wide. 

Here we would have got a perfectly round bead with 3 strips. The top one with 4 strips is beginning to get flatter.

Fig. 12: Beads with 1/2 cm wide paper

Here the beads are made with 1/2 cm wide strips. Again the bottom most bead is made with 1 strip and progressing to 4 strips at the top.

Here we see that because the width of the paper is only 1/2 cm, we get a flatter bead with even a single strip. The beads here are tinier than the beads with a wider strip and it is easier to make a saucer bead with a narrower strip.

Fig. 13: Five beads with 1/2 cm wide paper

Here we have a 5th bead in addition to the previous 4 beads in Fig 12. Here you can see the four beads again from a different angle and scale.

The left most bead here is made with 9 strips of paper and is a nice saucer. 

Just to give a perspective the green and purple bead in fig 5 is made with 40 strips of 1/2 cm width.

Fig. 14: Some saucer beads

The saucer beads in my previous post are made with 1/2 cm wide and 45 cm long paper and this was a thicker paper so I could get saucer beads of same size with just 2 strips that I got with 9 strips in the previous figure.

Fig 15: Dumble Bead strip 

To make a dumble bead as in Fig 2, use the pattern in this figure. Changing the length, the width and thickness of the paper, you can come up with different shaped beads.

Fig 16: Paper Beads set

Fig 17: Paper bead set

This is a set that I have made with paper beads. I have used pages from an old magazine to make this.

I have used 32 paper beads for this set and used a total of 243 strips of paper that were 2 cm wide at the base of the triangles.

Fig 18: Paper bead necklace

The necklace is made of 21 paper beads of increasing size with the smallest beads made with 3 strips each and the largest one made with 24 strips.

Fig 19: Paper bead earrings

The earrings beads are made with 3 strips each. 

Fig 20: Paper bead Bracelet

The bracelet is made with 9 beads of 3 strips each.

Fig 21: Bracelet

The snug sitting bracelet.

After making the beads, I coat the beads with a PVA glue to harden the bead. After this dries up, the bead is again coated with either varnish or transparent nail polish to make give it a gloss and make it water resistant. 

Hope the tutorial was helpful. I would love to hear how you found the tutorial, things you found lacking and questions if I have missed something. 

The next tutorial will talk about giving colour to the beads and how different pattern paper give a different effect to the beads.

If you find my work inspiring and create something similar, please quote my work and blog in your post. I would also appreciate if you leave a comment. All budding artists do need a pat on the back! Thanks for visiting!

Here and Now: Quilling and paper bead earrings

I have been busy making a lot of paper jewellery and here are the pictures.

Quilling Earrings

Vortex quilling with half pearls.

 Vortex quilling with rhinestones.

A quick flower with acrylic painted centre.

 Yellow and orange flower with a tiny blue fringed bud in the centre.

Paper bead earrings

Blue paper beads made using white paper coloured with blue permanent marker pen. The flower at the base is a punched out flower from a flattened soft drink can. I have a used a blue crystal bead and silver bead separators to finish the earrings.

Again a paper bead made by colouring white paper with blue permanent markers. Note the difference in the bead pattern. I will come up with a tutorial later to show how this difference can be achieved by colouring differently using the same supplies. At the base I have enclosed pearls in wire spirals and the ear hook is also made from scratch using nicrome wire.

A dainty piece made with blue and green 3 mm quilling strips rolled into tight coils. The tiny red separator bead in between the blue and green paper beads is recycled from an old rakhi. The pearl at the base is again enclosed in copper wire and the ear piece is hand made.

 Acrylic painted with pearl pink, the paper beads are an inch long. I painted the glitter line before rolling and realized that it is not a good idea. Learning for my next piece! The other beads are again recycled rakhi tit bits and the eye pin and ear piece and both handmade.

A lovely coloured green bead covered with wire. I love the shape of this bead. It is a saucer bead but not quite at flat as the ones in this post. Actually I made these at the same time when I was experimenting to get the saucer shaped beads. I am currently planning a paper bead tutorial in my head and there will be a post for this soon.


















If you find my work inspiring and create something similar, please quote my work and blog in your post. I would also appreciate if you leave a comment. All budding artists do need a pat on the back! Thanks for visiting!

Here and now : Quilling jhumkas

Continuing on with the paper jewellery series, here are some jhumkas that I made. I have a lot of quilling strips lying around that I had cut using the paper shredder and what better way to use them than making the jhumkas!

When I had first started paper quilling, I had always used hand cut strips cut using either the knife, the scissors or the paper trimmer as pre cut paper strips were not available in Sweden. When I got hold of a hand paper shredder, it was a luxury and I could cut down my strips cutting down the preparation time of 15 min to a few seconds! How thrilled I was with my shredder and kept on shredding paper of different colours much more than what I could use. So that is the source of my stack. Now that I have easy access to pre cut strips, I don't like to use the shredded ones because they look ugly to me now with their jagged edges. But they are fine in a tight coil and after making the tight coil, I sand paper the coil to give it a smooth finish. So that is the story behind the creation of these jhumkas.

I have more strips lying around and will get around to making matching pendents for the jhumkas soon!

A lovely combination of white, black, peach, red and yellow paper strips. There is a golden glitter painted edge at the base.  I like the paper to be clearly visible instead of covering it up with colour and hiding the beautiful paper colours and texture. I have to say that the picture is not doing justice to  the original piece. The jhumka  has been  completed with some pearls, class beads and multi coloured gems bead separator.

This is a piece that I love. With its light green, pink and white stripes and complementing beads, the jhumka is a beauty. The base has black acrylic paint stripes.

 And the hidden beauty is the little bells under the jhumka that shyly peeks out and makes a really tiny bell sound.

With yellow and green stripes it is a nice bright  combination. The base is a grid with glitter paint. I piece that I experimented on but not perfected.

This one is with pre-cut store bought blue strips. Here I mainly used blue strips with a little bit of black strips to give a break in the blue and painted the circles. Here I was experimenting with my newly bought Fevicryl 3D outliners and the glitter outliner.

If you find my work inspiring and create something similar, please quote my work and blog in your post. I would also appreciate if you leave a comment. All budding artists do need a pat on the back! Thanks for visiting!

Here and Now: Christmas cards

My son works with a school with differently abled children as a community and service activity from his school. He feels so enriched when ever he returns back from there. He always says ... we spend a few hours with them and get back so much of love and warmth that is a treasure to keep for life. Currently he is teaching the children music and loves their eagerness to learn and perform.

He will be going there again this Saturday and will be taking Christmas gifts for 2 children fulfilling their wish list. These are the cards I made for them to go with the gift. Hope it brightens their day!


There are some punched strips at the border of the cards. The oval border is outlined by Fevicryl 3D glitter outliner. The Christmas tree, star, and gifts are quilled and the tree and stars have been painted with silver and gold glitter outliner and the ground line below the tree is also with the 3D outliner. the gifts have silk thread wound around to represent a ribbon. The sentiment is stamped and heat embossed. The area between the oval border and rectangle border is distressed with inks.

  

I am attaching this post to

Beyond Grey Challenges : 

BGC#64: Sparkly Christmas and New Year Eve !!!!

If you find my work inspiring and create something similar, please quote my work and blog in your post. I would also appreciate if you leave a comment. All budding artists do need a pat on the back! Thanks for visiting!

Here and Now: Paper bead jewellery

Paper beads is so similar to quilling. It is just tight coils but instead of using a straight cut strip, a diagonal cut strip is used. Depending on the shape of the cut paper, length of strip and thickness of paper, there are so many bead shapes one can come up with. The more you practice, the more you learn to figure out what patterns will give beautiful colours to the beads.

Here are a couple of sets that I have created using different types of beads.

For the first one, I have used saucer beads. I created these beads by using a thick pamphlet paper that was 40 cm long. I cut out diagonal strips that were 0.5 cm on one side and which tapered down to almost 0 cm width on the other side. Like a long narrow triangle. Then using two of these identical strips stacked together, I rolled these strips. Basically by using 2 strips together, I increased the thickness of the paper and thus got a flatter bead that is bulging out from the center. And since the paper was so narrowly cut (0.5 cm at one end), I got the saucer shape. If I would have cut it wider to say 1 cm and only used one strip for rolling each bead, I would have got a rounder bead.

I used to earlier apply glue to the complete paper strip before rolling but with experiment, I have seen that I have more control of the shape if I apply glue to the very last bit of the strip while rolling. This way I can adjust the rolled tapered layers to give a neat finish and apply glue to the whole finished bead to harden it. Depending on the thickness of the bead, I give it a one to three coats of glue. Later I finish off the glue with either varnish or with nail polish. With tube kind of beads, I have even tried heat embossing and that gives a thicker layer over the bead.

For the saucer bead set, after the varnish layer, I painted the beads in multiple acrylic colours. (I couldn't decide on a particular colour and wanted the set to go with all my clothes so this seemed to be the best option :) )

Here are pictures of the beads and the finished set.

For the other set, I used tapered beads in different sizes. Using a white A4 printer paper (scrap with one side printed), I cut out the strips in pairs of identical sizes. The first two were triangles with 0.5 cm width, the next two with 1 cm width, the next two with 1.5 cm width. I assume you get the pattern. The best way to do this is to first draw parallel lines on paper. I wanted more strips out of my paper so I used the shorter side of the A4 paper as the length of my bead. I drew my first line at 0.5 cm from the edge of the paper, the next one 1 cm away from the first line, and subsequent lines increasing the distance by 0.5 cm. Once, I had these rectangles with progressively increasing widths, I drew a diagonal line through each of these triangles and get them out to get pairs of triangles with different widths.

Next I got down to colouring these triangles. I used permanent marker pens for this and only coloured about 2 mm on the edge of the triangles. Starting with 1/5th length as blue, the next 1/5th as black, then red, then again black and lastly blue. (I forgot to take pictures at this step, but the next set, I am creating, there will be pictures of intermediate steps.)

And then on to rolling. Here when I rolled the beads, starting with the wider side, instead of letting the narrow side roll to the center, I rolled the beads in a tapered fashion more like a cone. Once rolled, I sealed the edge, fixed the bead so that the layers were even and applied glue over the whole bead. An additional layer of glue after the first one dried and then a layer of transparent nail polish. I finished off the set with some glass beads and wire and here is the finished set.

If you find my work inspiring and create something similar, please quote my work and blog in your post. I would also appreciate if you leave a comment. All budding artists do need a pat on the back! Thanks for visiting!

Here and Now: Quilling jewellery

Lately I have been doing a lot of quilling jewellery and have been trying to get hold of jewellery wire, ear hooks beads and and all sorts of embellishments to create these lovely pieces. And of course I have been reading, watching videos and experimenting to learn more about making jewellery. So here are some of the pieces that I have created. I love wearing these colourful creations to match my clothes and the best thing is I can create my own colour combinations as per my need and wardrobe.

Here is a picture of a few of my quilled earrings.

And close ups...

                          

                              

  


                                

                        

If you find my work inspiring and create something similar, please quote my work and blog in your post. I would also appreciate if you leave a comment. All budding artists do need a pat on the back! Thanks for visiting!

Here and Now: My tools collection

When I first started quilling my only resources we hand cut paper strips and toothpick or a pin and of course lots of passion. Over the past few years, I have been collecting tools where ever I could find them. I have a weakness for tools and always want a good and varied supply in my collection: either store bought ones or self created DIY ones. So I have tools in my drawers from all over the world. Some are from Sweden, France and Canada and most from Dubai. In the past month, I have been doing a lot of jewellery making with quilling and so the pliers are my latest addition from India.

These are photos of part of my tools and supplies collection.