Russian leaves - bead weaving tutorials

For quite awhile now, Russian leaves have been all over Pinterest.  I fell in love with them, but it took several months before I had the time to devote to them.  I want to give a special shout out to Linda of Linda's Crafty Inspirations blog.  She has posted oodles of examples and freely shares her color charts, which is a great way to get started!  In the examples that I'm showing you, I plan to use the ones above as pendants, and the ones shown below as earrings. 

I have looked at a lot of different instructions for how to make these, and it comes down to just picking one that makes the most sense to you.  It is a bit hard to follow a chart unless you are already familiar with diagonal peyote stitch, but I followed Linda's advice and turned to Jill Wiseman.  You can download Jill's tutorial here, but before you tackle it, watch her instructional video.  If you follow along, you will pick this up in no time.

Diagonal peyote is really not that hard...you need to decrease on one edge and increase on the other edge each row, and once you understand how to do this, the rest is easy easy easy!  Jill's video will show you how. 

When you're finished stitching, you'll find that the leaves lose their shapes very quickly, no matter how tight a tension you use.  I decided to dip mine in Future acrylic floor polish to help maintain the shape.  I dipped each one twice, letting them dry in between...first on the convex side of a spoon and the second time on the concave side. 

Copyright 2018 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.