Sunday, May 17, 2015

New Beadies! Monster High Characters

It's harder nowadays for me to stay up on all the new characters in kids' shows. Luckily, I have some friends with small children. One of them has a daughter who is into Monster High. I was in the mood to do some designing, so I decided to start with her favorite. I ended up designing 5 that day.

Frankie
Draculaura
Cleo
Lagoona
Spectra
These designs were all created using icandream.com's Fashion Doll Pattern Maker. 

Some of the colors I used are hard to come by in retail stores. I recommend ordering from bolekscrafts.com. They have 60 colors of pony beads in two sizes (regular and mini). You can order in bags of 75 or 1000 in the regular size, or bags of 90 or 1000 in the mini size. Their prices are great, and their quality is better than the beads you will find in a retail store.

You can also try finding the assortment that comes in a divided container from Walmart to find most of the colors you need. 

I plan on putting these on the site officially soon. But these patterns are simple enough that you should be able to figure them out by looking at the picture. I am working on getting Expression 3 on my new computer so that I can work on my website.



On the Wings of an Eagle

I had a email request for help with the wings on the Eagle pattern. I had a look at them and thought I understood, but thought I'd make sure I was right. I was glad I did because it turned out to be more complicated than I was thinking it was. This is one of the most advanced patterns on the site.

The completed Eagle beadie.
I took pictures throughout the process of doing one of the wings and sent them to the person who emailed me. I decided to put them here on my blog as well, so that it can help others.

The first part is the easy part. Do the entire body of the eagle (head down to the feet) with no wings. Finish off the body. Then, take the 2nd string that the instructions call for and slide it through row 5 (the one that is brown-white-brown-white etc.) so that it is even on both sides.




All of these next instructions will be with brown beads. We will work with only one side of the string, so it will make one wing.

Add 7 beads. Go back through 2 beads. Then add 10 beads. Go back through 4 beads.


Now add 8 beads and go back through 5.


Now you will start the final shaping of the wing. Go back up through the 2nd bead that is currently loose.


Then take the string down through the next two loose beads.


Add 4 more beads and go back up through three of them.


Then back up through the next three loose beads.


Then down through the final 4 loose beads.


Finally take the remaining string through row 8 of the body of the eagle.


Repeat this process to do the wing on the other side. Finish off both of these strings.

In the picture below I've numbered the strings in the order you will put them on. The blue string indicates the part where you are adding beads and going away from the body of the eagle. Then the red string is where you're heading back toward the body. I hope this explanation is helpful for those who may wish to try making an Eagle.