When we were in New York, I spotted these “bindu threads” in Eileen Fisher.  I rather liked the idea of them, of having the option to wind them around a wrist or wear them as a necklace as I might choose and thought they’d also look pretty wound in amongst the folds of a scarf.  But the colours in the store weren’t to my taste and the $38 price tag seemed a little steep.

Looking closely at them, I figured that they’d be pretty straightforward to create and imagined that I could whip one up in no time.  Good grief, I’d make several, in all colours….I’d make them by the dozen ;-)

After the dust had settled from that trip, I sat down one evening with a bunch of beads from my stash and gave it a go.  Hmm.  The beads I had were too big for the seam binding I was using and my idea of encasing them between two pieces of binding resulted in a really bulky and ugly result.

Some weeks on, then, and having bought some smaller beads, I gave it another try today.  Threading the beads first onto a strand of thread and then encasing them in the seam binding is a slow and very awkward process, involving long lengths of thread which tangle and beads which want to be anywhere but under my thumb.  Remembering the original as being pretty haphazard and not exactly 100% neat, I thought I might speed the process up a little by using my sewing machine to zig zag in between each bead, but once more, the results were far from how I’d imagined.

So, it looks like there is no alternative to simply taking the time to thread each bead individually and wind the thread by hand, sewing each one in place as I go.  The sample piece above took me around fifteen minutes and before I went on to begin “the real thing”, I thought I’d test how well it dyes. 

Actually, the end result is pretty good – somewhat better than the original I think – but $38 suddenly doesn’t seem like a bad price when I cost my time in as well!