Bead embroidered rhodochrosite pendant

This will be the last little bead embroidery pendant for a short while, because I finally started working on a BIG one!  This stone is rhodochrosite, and like the others from the past few weeks, it's been sitting in my bin of crazy-beautiful stone cabochons for too long.  It's a small stone, and so the seed beads are mostly size 15/0s with a final row of size 11/0s.  

It's an odd shade of pink, and I felt that if I wasn't careful, it could end up looking like pepto bismol.  The stone has some crystalline "flaws" in it, so it wasn't terribly expensive; therefore, I felt pretty free to experiment with the bead colors.  The background of the stone has a peachy cast, but the swirling foreground is a cool pink, so I was a bit ambivalent about bead colors.  In retrospect, I think the deeper red color should have been cooler, but when you are looking at it straight on, the red doesn't show quite as much as in the angle of my photos...plus, the beads are REALLY tiny!

I feel like I have repeated similar instructions too frequently lately to write them all out again.  You can check the recent Leopard Skin Jasper pendant tutorial for a basic outline of the steps and match them up with the images shown here.

Or if you haven't already done this, you can download my free ebook chapter.  Step-by-step instructions for putting together a bead embroidered piece, including back stitch, edging brick stitch, and stack stitch can be found in the free first chapter of Every Bead Has a Story.  Chapter two has instructions for stitching a peyote stitch bezel, and Chapter three teaches the square stitch bail.

One thing I'll point out here is that I used two different colors of beading thread for this piece.  As you can see above, I switched from white (used for most of it) to black just for the row of edging brick stitch.  Since the stitches would be visible at the edges, I didn't want to use white.

This post contains affiliate links: Beadaholique

Copyright 2016 Cyndi Lavin. All rights reserved. Not to be reprinted, resold, or redistributed for profit. May be printed out for personal use or distributed electronically provided that entire file, including this notice, remains intact.