Art Jewelry Elements: Rainbow Bead Garden Stake Project!

I had this pretty garden stake that used to have beads hanging off of it - over time, the cording they were on broke and the beads were lost. But I still had this cool garden stake.

It has five little hooks soldered onto it, and I thought, well, rather than get rid of it, I'll make it a SueBeads project! It was painted that flat black color, so first I painted it with a metallic spray paint. Then, I made a rainbow of baroque beads with gorgeous wispy glass rods from GG Glass.

I had a think about what I would use to hang the beads, and I decided to use beading wire and crimp beads. So I went about gathering my supplies. I did not use my most expensive cording, nor did I use my most expensive crimp beads, as this will be outside in the weather.

I needed cutters, pliers and a crimper. I cut five pieces of beading wire, and decided I needed to start at the end of the wire first. I made the middle string first, as it was going to be the longest. When I put the first bead on the wire, I found that the bead hole (even though I made the bead on a 1/16" mandrel which is a small 1.5mm hole size) was too big. So I went through my newly acquired seed beads from Bead Fest Spring and picked out some matching colors.

So this is how the first bead that went on looks. I used matching beads so you wouldn't really see them too much. After that, I had to keep holding the wire up to the garden stake, to make sure all the beads would fit on in a pleasing manner! I chose the beads in a random size pattern, instead of making them all the same or making them in ascending or descending order. Cuz that's the way I roll.

This is how the first string looks. Pretty cute, huh?

Next, I laid out the other sets of beads - not the entire rainbow spectrum of beads would fit on the stake, as it is a circle and gets smaller in length the closer to the outside the strands get, so I decided to do partial rainbows.