Beads crochet, something that I love the most to work on. Yes it is a lot of work stringing the beads first, and hoping that it has the correct order other… the piece is messed up. A regular question people ask me is ‘What are the best beads for crochet’? To solve it once and for all; a dedicated post about the best beads for crochet.
To be honest, you can crochet with every bead that comes along. But not every bead is the best bead for the perfect outcome. The size of beads really matters. You can crochet with round big beads, with facets, rocailles, rocailles mixes, little tubes and so on. The outcome will be really different and let along the level of difficulty when crocheting the piece. But what is the best bead for crocheting?
Delica or Rocaille
Most times I use Delica’s or Rocaille beads from Miyuki or Preciosa Ornela. These tiny beads are perfect for beads crochet. They fall in place easily and the level of difficulty is very low. Once you got the hang of it, you can create piece after piece in just a few hours or minutes even. As the beads are always of the same size, like 11/0 or 10/0 or 8/0, they line up nice and tight. But what about other beads or mixing them together? Well, you can!
Mix it up!
Once I bought a package of Preciosa Ornela and didn’t read the description that well. It was a mixed bag of small rocailles in the sizes 11/0, 10/0 and 9/0. I put them all in the spinning yarn, put the needle in and kept stringing the beads until I had the right length of thread. When I started crocheting… I noticed that they didn’t line up diagonale the way they suppose too. Torn the thing apart, started over using the ‘donut technique’ and it came out really awesome! Some bracelet had little ‘bumps’ before of the bigger beads, which made it really cool. So; mix sizes up.
If you start mixing up, try for a special effect to lay them in the correct order. Like: 15/0 15/0, 11/0 11/0, 9/0, 11/0 11/0 15/0 15/0 etc. As the beads are going ‘up and down’ in sizes, the spiral will get a really special form like the one below. How awesome it that!
But how about facets
You can use facets in beads crochet. You can also mix them with regular rocailles or delica’s if you wish. A complete bracelet with facets is possible, but no matter how tight you pull the thread, you will always see it. This is because facets can’t be place ‘perfectly’ against one another. As the facets are not round, they will always show a little piece of the thread between them. If you mix up your thread with the beads, you can reduce ‘the noice’ it creates in between the beads. Just give it a try.
Conclusion
You can use almost every bead when doing beads crochet to be honest. The only thing that matters is the level of difficulty when picking out different beads than rocailles or Delica’s. Just give it a try to find out what works for you. Or mix it up and see how the outcome of the bracelet looks. Creating little ‘swaps’ isn’t that hard and you don’t have to string let’s say 3 meters before noticing this is not what you expected.
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