Beaded Bag

 So here is the finished beaded bag I was alluding to last week.  I started this a couple years ago when I had a terrible case of start-itis.  If memory serves me, my local Hobby Lobby was discontinuing some or all of their Delica beads and had a big clearance sale.  Delica beads are Japanese and quite expensive because they are so well and precisely made.  They are the DMC of beads as far as color uniformity goes and are put to good use in peyote stitch projects because they are so uniform in size and shape.  I bought quite a few packets of various blue shades and mixed them together and strung them up in a hank with my bead spinner.  I didn't know how many I had so I thought of a simple drawstring bag beaded with single beads on one side of the fabric only.  That way I'd get the most mileage out of that seemingly small hank of beads.  I used size 8 DMC pearl cotton thread in a pale blue shade and knit a few rows of stockinette on my 0000 needles and made a few yarn over buttonholes for a drawstring to go through.

 I maybe got through an inch of beaded knitting before abandoning it in my bead knitting tin where bead knitting goes to die.  Once fair season came around, I began thinking of what I could enter this year and found this and decided to finish it.  Bead knitting really is not a complicated process but it is slow going because you are knitting with thread on practically piano wire.  Before you start, you thread all your beads onto the thread and have to keep sliding the beads down the thread.  Keep in mind, you might have 3 yards of strung beads on your ball of thread when you first start.  You might knit 6 inches worth of beads into place with 12 yards of thread and still have to keep sliding the remaining 2 5/6 yards of beads down the line as you go.  In any case, you will always have yards of unwound thread to deal with so I've found it is best to keep your thread in a bowl to contain this mass.  Here is my work in progress at rest in my bead knitting bowl.

 This is towards the end of the project and towards the end of the second ball of thread.  The bowl is also handy because as you work, the thread won't roll all over the floor.  In the end, I used just over 2 balls of thread and all but 30 or so of the beads. 

This bag may not look simple but it is.  It is just a plain strip of fabric knit as long as I possibly could with amount of beads I had.  The ends are knit in stockinette but the beaded part is all garter stitch with beads saddled between the stitches on only one side of the fabric.  The sides were whip stitched with the tails of the knitting and I made 2 twisted cords for the drawstring.  I think my favorite thing about bead knitting is the weight of the work because beads are made of glass.  As delicate as this object appears, it is heavy because of the beads.  I am very proud to say that this bag won the Grand Champion in the needlework class of the Washington County Fair and won me a gift certificate to a yarn shop!