Tubular Herringbone, Cubic-Right Angle Weave, 2-hole Shaped Beads and Kassie Shaw

Join Kassie Shaw for Some Whirligig Fun!
Kassie Shaw has done it again! She’s brought us something fun to weave and she put it all together for us in a kit! The bead-weaving pattern for Kassie’s Whirligig Bracelet, a combination of tubular herringbone and cubic right-angle weave, is available in the Oct/Nov Beadwork magazine. The magazine and a kit filled with all the beads you need to make one of these bracelets is available for a limited time in either blue or bronze. 

Kassie’s design starts by weaving seed beads and fire-polished round beads in cubic right-angle weave (CRAW).

As the bracelet progresses, seeds beads and crescent-shaped 2-hole beads are worked into Kassie’s well-illustrated variation of tubular herringbone. And it’s the crescent beads that put the whirl in the whirligig! (too corny, I know)

As always, I like to go back to basics before taking on a variation, this way, if I make a mistake I can help myself out of it. If you’re new to cubic right-angle weave (CRAW), here are some expert tips on How to Get Started:

• Pick out a tube of your favorite large seed beads—size 6 or size 8 will work the best so you can see what you’re doing.
• Until you get the thread path down, consider using four different colors of seed beads so you can track each unit as you add it to the base.
• Choose a color of beading thread that contrasts with your seed beads so you can see your thread path.
• Use a heavier weight (6lb or 10 lb) FireLine beading thread so your work doesn’t fall apart as you go.

For step-by-step instructions on how to weave CRAW, check out this bead-by-bead tutorial “How to Do the Cubic Right-Angle Weave Like a Pro.”

The herringbone stitch (aka Ndebele) is commonly built off of a woven ladder of beads. It can also be started with a “stacked start,” as is illustrated in Melinda Barta’s book Mastering Herringbone Stitch.

Either way, the stitch is then worked as follows: String 2 beads. Pass down through the next bead and up through the bead after it. Repeat around the tube. At the end of the round, pass through the first beads of the previous and current rounds to step up to the new round.
The Whirligig bracelet design starts herringbone off a previously stitched CRAW unit. From there, crescent-shaped beads and seed beads form the traditional herringbone stitch, creating that “wow factor.”

Back to those mistakes and what to do. Here is some advice from Melinda.

“If you make an error, fix it! You may be discouraged once you find a mistake, but you’ll be much happier in the long run if you back out to correct it. Make light of the situation by thinking of it as the “frog stitch” – Rip it! Rip it!”

Have fun weaving with these stitches and exploring Kassie’s variation in her Whirligig Bracelet design. Then please share your experience with us at BeadingDaily.com.

Yours in creativity,