Okay—peyote bezel time!

Shall we do a gemstone cabochon or a coin?

While people are voting I’ll explain a bit about what I’ve found helps this process go smoothly.

First, regular shapes are easier than irregular shapes to start with.

But it actually matters more what the edge of your stone looks like. We want a fairly thick edge like this:

A sharp thin edge is ok but it makes it much harder to keep from pulling out of the bezel.

This marcasite is a good example of something that has a sharp edge.

The lapis is gonna be a huge pain because it’s irregular in every dimension.

So this is what I’ll be showing you how to make—although not with labradorite today, since I don’t have any.

The idea is to make a piece of tube woven peyote stitch the grips the stone (or “captures” it, in jewelry jargon) so you can add a bail on top (the loop for it to hang from.

It’s nice when you want 2 sides of a piece to show, or there’s no hole, or the material is fragile.

So these are my choices today:
- picture jasper
- fossil with agate druzy, I forgot the name
- silver sheen obsidian
- red jasper

Anyone have a preference?

Okay we are doing the giant fossil.

Which honestly is just such an amazing stone, check it out.

You need 2 sizes of seed bead.

I try to choose colors that either dissolve into the stone or contrast intensely.

And I try to make sure that the finishes (matte, silver lined, luster, etc) match each other or at least harmonize with the stone finish.

Sometimes this involves going back and forth between my seed bead size caches til I find a pairing I like.

But you need Delica 11/0s to start, and then size 15/0s (I like tohos best but any Japanese made one will work—I have less good of luck with others).

I’m trying to pick.

I’ve chosen an ivory colored 15/0 to match the spiral pattern and the specks in the stone, and now I want a Delica color to match....

Okay, well.

This is going to make it 80 times worse but I think we are gonna do a dark to light gradient in the frame.

Delica colors are opaque black, opaque dark chocolate, and opaque cinnamon.

Sometimes the artistically necessary choice isn’t the easiest one, but here we go.

I strongly considered green.

But ultimate the dark red browns were really calling out to me.

https://twitter.com/wearestardusted/status/1245781047083761664?s=21 https://twitter.com/wearestardusted/status/1245781047083761664

Okay.

So to start with we want a peyote tube that is just a touch larger than the circumference of the thing we are setting.

We make this out of the Delica 11/0s. And it’s gonna take me a few minutes to set up my loop so please be patient.

By the way, for cutting fireline you cannot get better than a pair of flush cutters.

I adore these.

Since some people are interested in gradients—here’s how I think about them.

Most of us don’t have ALL the colors. So we need to fool our eyes into thinking we have more colors than we do.

Think of color A, and color V. I transition by mixing like:

A A A V A A V A V V A V V V

Or like this between black and brown—you can steepen or lengthen the gradient based on when you add your first bead of the second color—here I did one brown and then four black ones, and went from there.

Our eyes can tell. But from far away it’s sneaky.

Well my intuition of how much space I’d need was a bit off. Because I think that having more black at the bottom anchors the design nicely, I’m not gonna undo all of it to force an even distribution of color.

Here we go. We want a loop that fits easily around the edge, but doesn’t leave much extra space.

Pull it snug and then add a couple beads. Trust me. You don’t want to pull out 4 rows when it’s just barely too tight to work with later—or work with it anyway, shattering the beads

Now I’m gonna add a row to the loop—it’s ok if it’s odd or even numbers of beads, circular peyote is very forgiving that way.

Remember, this is what we are making

(That soul-of-cotton-candy stone is actually named pink scolecite, for those who are curious.)