Featuring 18 exciting projects presented with detailed step-by-step photography, color variations, and practical illustrations, this fresh approach to seed bead jewelry teaches crafters how to combine materials, techniques, colors, inspiration, and design ideas for jewelry with a contemporary edge. Inspired by a wide range of sources—from Indian Punjabi folk costumes to Native American beading—the designs in this inventive resource fuse materials such as silver, copper wire, seed beads, Czech glass, and crystals into these traditional arts in order to achieve a unique outcome.
This Eyewitness guide to crystals and gemstones provides information on all aspects of this topic, as well as showing the reader diamonds being used to cut through a brick wall and where crystals grow in your home.
Beading with Crystals: Beautiful Jewelry, Simple TechniquesBicones, buttons, drops, rhinestones. Glittering and colorful, these and other multi-faceted glass crystal beads have become the jewelry maker's material of choice. They're the star of the show in this sparkling entry in the Beading with series, which features a fabulous combination of both simple and more complex projects. Crafters start their creative journey by learning basic techniques, including stringing and simple wirework (looping, wrapping, coiling).
The author headed for South America at the age of twenty-five with a clear aim "to do something in [his] life." Fascinated by the beauty of quartz crystals in Brazil, he started to collect them enthusiastically and he is now the only collector of giant crystals in the world. Conquered by their secret power and the perfection of their forms, he penetrated the intimate world of crystals and marveled at the magnificent play of light reflected on their smooth faces. Some of the phenomenal crystals "survived" hundreds of millions of years untouched.
