Wednesday, June 3, 2009

The Bead Stylist: Ann Benson Free Bead Stitching Tutorials

I'm dyslexic and was more than relieved when I happened on beads as a business that I wouldn't have to attempt any type of jewelry designing; but, the more I learned about and handled the beads my artistic side started to wonder what  I could accomplish with beads.

I wasn't crazy about just bead stringing and I knew I wanted to do something which had texture, and more dimension I guess than just stringing beads.

I was introduced to bead weaving or bead stitching as Ann Benson refers to this technique and fell in love with the possibilities instantly; only to realize that the written instructions may have well been in greek because I just couldn't make heads or tails of what they were trying to get across.

Then I figured, let me get some visuals that should do the trick, and again there always seem to be a step that I was missing or just could not understand.

Being dyslexic, a researcher and determined is a very useful combination as I don't give up easily and figured there had to be some instruction that could help me see what I was missing that my brain could wrap around and I discovered animated tutorials by Ann Benson.

As a result of seeing the animations I was able to finally learn the brick stitch - yeah!

That was about two years ago and we have a lot more interactive tools than the animated tutorials.

My new favorite is BeadTV for $3.95 a month, and Ann Benson's Beads East online store offers 11 free video and print tutorials and instructions as well as beautiful bead kits and beads.

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