I love tessellated designs and beadwork stitches lend themselves very well to tessellated patterns. I also get a lot of requests for skull patterns, and designed this one for Halloween.


My model was done with Japanese size 11 seed beads, plastic skulls from a very inexpensive bracelet from a party supply store, sterling toggle clasps, and size 8 black seed beads.


There is a bit of shaping in odd count peyote, the rest is done in even count tubular peyote. The red dots on the sides are the edges when it's flattened, and the ones on the bottom of the right hand side are done as a last row of beads to zip up the bottom, even though it's even count, the design is odd count on the front and back so it needs an extra row to "zip" up the bottom.
This is a close up of the fringe beads. I couldn't resist the inexpensive bracelets when I found them, I have some pressed glass skulls, but I knew the black and white plastic skulls would be perfect, and they were, the other option I was thinking of was using Halloween confetti, there are some great confettis out now that say things like boo, or shaped like skulls, witches hats, and ghosts. All those confettis are easily pierced if they don't already have holes to use.

The reason I did the clasp the way I did is partially as a design element, but mostly for convenience, I have long hair that loves to get trapped in clasps. I started a topic in the forum to get other ideas of how to deal with clasps and hair.

Here are some tiled backgrounds for your computer wallpaper or for backgrounds on pages you can use. If you are using them as wallpapers, for Windows, right click and choose "set as wallpaper" then in the control panel under display/desktop set your background image to tiled. If you are planning to use the backgrounds on a webpage or blog, please right click to save, then upload to your own server.




Happy Halloween!