Beaded Wrist Warmers

 I have felt the need to do some bead knitting in the form of beaded wrist warmers.  Lord knows I have lots of beads but I don't have an abundant supply of of solid colored fingering weight yarn.  I recently discovered an excellent yarn shop near me that I can drive to by myself (!!!) and I picked up a few skeins of appropriately colored yarn.  This is M & K Alpaca Silk which was soft and wonderful to work with.

Now for the beads.  These are some size 9 Martha Blue colored seed beads I bought from an embroidery/yarn shop in Thirsk, England.  Mom and I were in town visiting James Herriot's surgery and this was a lovely little souvenir.  The most tedious part of bead knitting is stringing your beads on nylon thread and then transferring them onto your knitting yarn.  Size 9 beads work perfectly with fingering weight yarn but that size can be hard to find.  Gutermann beads are size 9 and sometimes sold in racks in quilt shops or fabric stores.

Using size 0 needles, I cast on 50 stitches and used this charted pattern for the design.  I used a provisional cast on, undid it at the end, and used a three needle bind off to join the edges.  My nieces were quite interested in these so I might be making more for some birthdays later in the year.