Woven Planter Update

Hola Everyone!

A couple of months ago I posted a Woven Bead Planter that I had made using plastic fuse beads.  What you might not know is that after I made that first planter and posted it here, I got a teensy bit obsessed, and continued making more and more planters… In fact I may have run out of space on my windowsill. Just maybe. And since I experimented with a bunch of different patterns, I thought you guys might like seeing all my other planters.

As you can see, some of the patterns were relatively simple and some were, well, exceedingly more difficult.  One of the most difficult, surprisingly, was my multi-colored camouflage planter, precisely because there was no pattern, but colors had to cut in and out of rows and be somewhat random looking.  So for this pattern I actually drew out the entire thing on graph paper, and with sharpie I marked each row as I wove it into the piece, because otherwise I got WAY too confused.  Especially since the colored pencil colors didn’t match the plastic bead colors.  (For instance brown might be turquoise.)

For other patterns I also drew them out on graph paper, but I would only draw a couple of repeats to get a handle on the pattern and then once I got going I was usually able to just keep repeating the same pattern over and over in the weaving.  I started out sketching patterns on the computer, but then found it was just much simpler and faster to sketch out on graph paper, and so I switched techniques.  Here you’ll see the small plaid patterned planter I made (try saying that three times fast!) and you’ll see the plaid pattern sketched out.  However, you might notice that the pattern doesn’t quite match the planter.  That’s because I either figured out the first plaid in my head, or on the computer, but however I did it I don’t have a graph paper sketch for it.  But I do have a graph paper sketch for another planter I’m working on that I haven’t finished yet, which uses a much larger size plastic container as the base, and so I needed to sketch out how the plaid would get extended when it was six rows higher.

As you’ll see, once I got a handle on the simple plaid I decided to try more of an argyle sort of plaid, and I also got excited about trying it in one specific color palette, pink!  What you’ll notice on the top of this pattern is I sketched out what rows I was going to envision being woven together, and created a pattern of White, Light Pink and Medium Pink intersecting.  I then envisioned the rows moving diagonally down in both directions from the starting point at the top.  As those rows intersected I would decide what color had been created.  So for instance if two Light Pink lines were intersecting they would create Medium Pink.  If a Light Pink and a Medium Pink intersected you got a Dark Pink.  And where two Medium Pink lines intersected you got Purple.  And so on, assuming that the White rows were essentially transparent, so they would get overridden by the colored row. (A Medium Pink row and a White row results in Medium Pink, not Light Pink which is what would happen if you were actually mixing paints, for instance.)  Honestly the hardest thing of all was figuring out the 5 colors of colored pencil to use!  Once that was figured out I found the actual pattern pretty intuitive to draw.  As for beading the pattern, well I made myself a little black cutout template thing that looked like a saw-tooth, so I could slide up and isolate the row I was actually beading in case I was getting lost.  I didn’t need to draw over the rows in sharpie this time because it was easy to see where exactly I was because of the strict pattern and the fact that the colors matched.  (My pattern extended further to the left, I just wanted you to see more about how I built the pattern at the beginning.)

I hope these have inspired you to try out some bead weaving patterns of your own.  (And I hope you’ve enjoyed the small glimpse into my huge succulent collection!) I actually have another Pinterest project to show you next week, as soon as I can get it photographed.

Ciao, Allison

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