I love these cabochons! They’re from Rosebudlia, and I was looking for something with both silver and gold on, found these and fell in love with them.
First I glued the cabochons to an Ultrasuede base. Although some beaders prefer to use Lacey’s stiff stuff as beading foundation, I personally prefer to use Ultrasuede. You can leave areas unbeaded for a different feel if you wish, and there is no need to colour the white base to match your beads. That said, I used grey ultrasuede on the front of this set, and on finishing it just didn’t look right, so I used black fabric pen on the edges this time, which I have handy for writing labels in school uniform!
I peyote stitched a bezel with delicas and size 15 seed beads, and then cut this out close to the stitching. I used thick interfacing fabric for my lining, cut slightly smaller than the pendant, and taped to the ultrasuede with double sided tape. I then used black ultrasuede as a backing.
Size 11 seeds were used for the brick stitched edging and herringone stitch bail. Miyuki drops finish the edging off. Using these in this fashion showed that some of these differed in shape, with some little and fat and some more tapered, and it is this that makes their spacing look a little irregular on the pendant before I worked out what it was causing it. I then made the earrings in the same way, but was more careful to select even shaped drops for the edging.
I thoroughly enjoyed this project, and the cabochons were lovely to work with, which is just as well as I ordered quite a lot of them in different sizes and patterns! Expect to see a lot more of these in the coming months. Now onto my project with my lovely Cilla bead!
