A few years ago a friend was telling me that knitting with beads is easy, and showed me how before she moved away.

But so many details I didn’t know to ask about. What is an 8/0 vs an 11/0 and does it matter and is the bigger number the smaller bead or the opposite, and where did those numbers come from anyway and why are they fractions. And if you’re just stringing them, what kind of thread should you use?

Questions I learned when an online yarn store was selling out their beads and I thought, hey, those must work with yarn because it’s a yarn store selling them, right? And I bought a bunch of pretty colors. Plus some sparkly white to be, y’know, practical and all that.

And there they have sat.

I found a simple beaded scarf pattern from someone who appeared to be American and it seemed like you wouldn’t need to buy a beading loom for it, so that was good–till I read a scathing review saying the pattern had been lifted from someone else’s video.

Now whether she’s right about that or not I don’t know; it seems to me that that simple a mesh would be like designing feather and fan–it’s easy, it’s been passed on forever, I’ve known people who claim they don’t know how to do lace, just feather and fan. Which..is…a lace pattern, but never mind.

So maybe it’s like that.

But whatever, I followed her link because a video is always going to show you more anyway. (I’d skip the first four minutes or so.)

I’m guessing it’s in Russian. It might be Ukrainian but I think that’s hoping for too much. There are English captions as best as the machine could do.

I still don’t know how to pick the right synthetic thread and size needle to make such a thing, and I’m willing to buy a pattern, hopefully from a Ukrainian.

After the holidays are over I just might try after all out of curiosity.

But even so I’ll be buying from Ukrainians. They need the help and the work and I love what they create. (Yeah, I do–I need to knit that. Gorgeous.)