I was waaaay into beads before I got waaaay into quilts, so there are lots of beads in the studio.  Thank goodness they take up less room than fabric 😉

A few of the bead drawers

I’ve read a bit about using beads in quilts, and I took a class with Mary Stori a few years ago.

Here are a few of my uses of beads so far.  Most recently, I added a row of tiny silver-lined glass beads around the edge of a star in my quilt for the Michael Miller challenge.  It took most of a day to get this done!  YIKES!

I outlined the focal point of my Michael Miller challenge quilt with beads

A while back I made this little wall hanging as a shop sample for a friend, and put beads both on it and hanging from it.

There are beads on the sun, and that’s how I learned that sewing on beads can distort the quilt!  I used techniques from jewelry making to create a beaded fringe for the bottom of the piece with larger beads.

And beads were used to give Overall Sam a fish in one block and a toy airplane to fly in another block when I made this wall hanging from a few years ago.  The blocks are based on a pattern from Eleanor Burns.

Finally, I used beads to make fancy zipper pulls for some of my pouches.

Give beads a try!  And if you don’t have enough beads, let me know…