In My Taylor Swift Beadie Era

 My daughter really likes Taylor Swift's music, and now she has passed that on to my grandson who is 5 years old. Naturally, the last time I visited them, I had the opportunity to see the Eras concert on Disney Plus and several of her videos. 

I was inspired by all the beautiful outfits Taylor wore in her Eras concert, and designed some Taylor beadies based on those.

These designs are heavily based on Lily's icandream.com doll design template and I am very grateful for the assistance her website provides when I am designing people or cartoon characters. I made all of these patterns using wee pony beads (available from Bolek's Craft Supplys) and plastic lacing.

These patterns will be coming to the website soon, with stringpath drawings, but you can see enough about how most of these are made to be able to do it without a drawing.

A few of the Taylor designs

Lover Era

Fearless Era

Acoustic Interlude, or as my daughter calls it, "Surprise Songs"

Evermore Era

Reputation Era

Speak Now Era

Red Era

folklore Era

1989 Era

Midnights Era

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.

Beadies for Easter

It's almost Easter. What a wonderful time of year.

If you're looking for a fun craft for the kids to do over Easter weekend, here are some ideas:

 I have several patterns for "bunnies" on my beadiecritters website. Here is one of them.

One of my website visitors made bunnies from this pattern in several different colors. So cute!

An Easter basket pattern, complete with chocolate bunny!

A whole set of Easter items, including 3 eggs, a bunny, and a basket.

 

This chick pattern comes from makingfriends.com.

This lamb pattern is so cute! Also from Making Friends.

If you are entertaining younger children who may not be able to do these crafts, put out a bowl of pastel-colored pony beads and let them string them on plastic lacing. (Not recommended for children under 3 unless closely supervised.)

New Video! How to Make a Beadie Gecko

Today I made a video tutorial for making a beadie gecko. This is a great project for beginners, and I hope that a video will help explain the process if anyone is struggling. I'm hoping to make more videos, showing other techniques.