Playing with my beads...

There are some earrings that keep popping up on Pinterest but I couldn't find a pattern for them. You may have seen these:

The photo linked to the Jewelry Making Professor site HERE but the pattern is apparently no longer available there to members or at least they don't come up when I search through the earring tutorials there. I saved the photo for future reference and recently spotted a YouTube tutorial HERE for a ring that looked very similar to the earrings so I watched it yesterday. Although they changed some of the kinds of beads they used, it is indeed pretty much the same pattern.

However, there is one thing that is apparent in the Pinterest earrings that they don't do in the video. That is to connect the seed beads at the points where the strands of netting intersect. When I tried making a sample using smaller beads yesterday, I was not at all happy with the netting crossing over the top of the other netting without going through it. I was able to figure out how to fix that.

I didn't have any 10mm pearls or other round beads on hand so today I stopped at Beads One and picked up half a strand of 10mm round crystals so that I could make a proper sample earring. I ran into a couple of snags along the way though. The main problem was that the beads were very large and slippery and the whole thing kept wanting to fall apart in my hand. I solved that by weaving back around through the beads after each of the first couple of steps to secure everything. This would be during Step 1 of the video. I reinforced the beads after each "cross through".

Perhaps my beads were smaller than the ones used in the video because 10 seed beads for the netting were too many for me. After experimenting, I determined that 8 was what I needed to use. I added the first string of eight. Then, when I added the next strand, which would cross the first one, I picked up 2 seed beads and went through the third seed bead from the top of the first strand. Next, I picked up five more seed beads (for a total of eight including the one I crossed through) and proceeded as directed. I did the same thing with the next two strands that cross at the bottom of the earring but this time I picked up five seed beads first, went through the sixth bead from the bottom of the first strand and then added two more seed beads. I hope that makes sense.

Once I had the netting in place, I could see some gaps that could use some seed bead fillers. I added one on each side of the earring and two at the top and two at the bottom where the netting ends. If you look closely at the Pinterest photo, you can see that they also added the two side seed beads like I did. In the photo below, I've marked which beads I added at the end in red. I probably should have gone back around through the netting to pull those outside beads in better and I will do that when I make my final earrings. 

Oh, and I liked the bicones that they used in the Pinterest photo but I only added them on the sides of my sample because I liked that the earring has more of an oval/oblong shape that way rather than being round. I think they also used 4mm pearls, instead of 6mm, and I might try that sometime as well.

Although at first I wasn't sure if my earring would look like much of anything but I'm very pleased with the results and I'll definitely make a pair of these for myself.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention another thing that I had to change. When the tutorial says to pick up two seed beads, a bicone (side pearl in the video) and two seed beads, they wouldn't fit on my earring so I had to use just one seed bead on either side of the bicone. Also, I tried making an earring using 4mm pearls instead of 6mm and that doesn't work. 

UPDATE: I have found the original "Victoria's Crown" pattern for sale on Etsy. You can buy it HERE at mindmyownbeadsness.

These are the beads that I used in my sample earring:

• 11/0 seed beads Miyuki "Light Bronze" (457L)
• 10mm round crystal "#C12 AB" (Beads One)
• 4mm bicones "Light Smoked Topaz - #C29 AB" (Beads One)
• 6mm druks "Gold and Smoky Topaz Luster"  

UPDATE: I tried the tips that were posted in the comments below and here you can see how my sample turned out next to the one I made by following the YouTube video: