I've spent a couple of weeks doing a bunch of Valentine patterns that I own from the now-defunct Danette's Beady Buddies. I posted the photos of the ones I made on my Margo's Beadie Critters FaceBook page. They are really cute.
In the process of doing these patterns, I discovered that some of them didn't really work as well as they looked like they would in the drawing of the pattern. A certain amount of this might be due to the materials I use - wee pony beads and plastic lacing - but a lot of it is, I believe, because they drawn without ever being tested.
If you've got enough experience at making Beadie Critters, you can find ways to modify the patterns so that they work better. Let me show you some examples.
Problem 1: Ear Issues
You can see that "Li'l Foxy" has a little issue with the first row of beads on his head being raised up from the second row. This is because the ears are ending with a two-bead row before proceeding to row 2 of the head. The pattern shows the ears resting just fine against the first two rows of the head for all three of the patterns for the critters shown above, but that won't ever actually happen.
I came up with a couple of solutions to this problem that worked.
In the picture below, I started with 2 beads for the first row of the raccoon's head instead of 4. Then, I strung on 4 beads for the ears. Completion of the ears this way meant that the ears stuck up just a little more than in the drawn pattern, but it avoided that humped look that we got with the completed fox above.
For the tiger, I did the same technique (reduced row 1 of the head by 2 beads), but used only 3 beads for the ears. This is still pretty humped. This was an early attempt to fix the problem, and the racoon was completed later with slightly better results.
The picture below shows another way to do the ears. I added one extra bead, and then went through that extra bead sideways like you would for an arm or other appendage, pulling tight before going on to row 2 of the head.
So, if you have a pattern that shows the ears like the pattern drawings below, you now have a couple of possibilities for making this pattern work.
Can you see the change I made to this elephant beadie to make the ears work?
And on this bunny?
Problem 2: Arm Issues
A lot of the patterns I was using to make Valentine critters had arms that were two beads wide seamlessly working with the rest of the body. Again, this is never going to work.
So for these types of arms, I had two methods I used. One was similar to the second method I used on the ears, adding a bead and going through that single bead before continuing with the body row. See that on the Mickey Mouse and Tiger below.
The other method was to simply make the arms only 1 bead wide instead of 2. I used that method for the Minnie Mouse and Mouse below.
You could choose either one of these methods to make the arms work on a pattern that is written with arms that are two beads per row.
With these two modification methods in your toolbox, there are a whole variety of patterns that you previously would have given up on or not tried because they didn't work as drawn. Now you can do them!
