Fiber & Bead Jewelry
By Helen Banes with Sally Banes

      Make any item out of this book and one thing is certain – you will be sure to impress just about anybody. You don’t have to spend lots of money to do it either, or obtain any unusual or hard-to-store items, which is good news. Even better news is that this is the perfect book for anybody who has odd beads and threads left over from other projects and is keen to recycle them; even the workboard is made by reusing some old pieces of corrugated card. Just cut up a large box as I did and you are away.

      All this sounds too good to be true but it isn’t, and you will find this craft easy to do (albeit time consuming) and rather addictive. Simply pin a grid to the board, add the pattern and proceed using a combination of weaving and beading to produce wonderful necklaces and other items such as small bags, amulet purses and bracelets. This book could have featured a few more items other than necklaces I thought, but I also soon found that it is easy to graph one’s own work so I soon remedied that as this is a simple technique to master. Helping this along are the staged photographs and clear instructions that take the reader through each stage of the method. Woven (pardon the pun) through all this is a description of the author’s travels and inspirations for the work, taken from many different cultures. There are chapters describing the colors, traditions and elements of design from various places and a gallery of work, although there are a lot of patterns here too and plenty of food for creative thought. This is a beautifully fashioned book that is readable, hugely inspiring and easy to understand as well as being a whole lot of fun. I’ve got lots of books on jewelry making but this one might well be my very favorite.