My recent class with Lisa Yoder inspired me to finally finish the bead stitch sampler book I started in 2014. I had stopped because I’d reached a fussy stage where I need to fuse fabrics together to make the cover and I couldn’t be bothered. Now that the itch to bead was back, it was easy to get the cover ready and finish the project.

In the instructions in First-Time Beading on Fabric: Learning to Bead in Nine Easy Lessons, Liz Kettle suggests “intuitive beading” on the cover: doing one thing at a time without planning ahead. I dove in and made up my designs as I went. It was incredibly satisfying and even the things I wasn’t sure about worked out fine in the end.

As I worked, I looked in my sampler to get ideas for things to put on the cover. The fringe on the spine, while a bit of a challenge to add since it gets sewn on after the book is assembled, gave me an opportunity to break out lots of novelty beads I’d been waiting to use.

Overall, the whole project was great fun, a wonderful excuse to use a variety of stitches and beads just because I wanted to. Now that it’s finished, I’ve realized the other benefit to making this sampler beyond the obvious one of learning and practice: it was something I could bead to death. I’d like to do some more beading soon, but I will have to come up with a project. While I don’t want to make another sampler, this was a great way to learn while having an excuse to bead like a fiend.