Crochet with beads – Kate Made

January, 2020

I have for some years now worked on beaded tubular crochet ropes mainly to produce ropes for beaded jewellery or simply for key hangers. Due to a visit to Japan as I stumbled across the amazing book to the right, this interest was expanded to making beaded crochet bags. Even if the patterns are in Japanese, the charts makes it possible to decipher them with an little additional help form Google Translate.

However, if one wants to go exploring further, crochet stitches beautifully accompanied with beads, then there is not much help to find in existing litterature or websites. When it comes to crochet litterature it is assumed that one is only interested in the frontside, but when crocheting with beads it is the backside that will become front. Further, bags are typically produced in cylindrical shapes (one long spiral), so there will be no alternating front and back view of a crochet stitch as depicted in traditional crochet books.

During the Christmas holidays I thus decided to make my private crochet study, to figure out which traditional stitches would be suited for beaded crochet bags. Being an engineer, I approach this task very systematically with the outset in the Danish version (picture to the right) of “200 crochet stitches: …” by Sarah Hazell, simply starting from one end. The criteria for my stitches are that they are somewhat dense, as I don’t necessarily want a lining in my bag. Further, the stitches should not be too complicated/special/extensive in the sense that beads should form a natural part of the stitch. From these sets of criteria, I found that 24 stitches would be suitable for a beaded crochet project. I have depicted the front and backside result of those 24 stitches below together with the stitching chart and presumed name of the stitch (I have followed the charts, but I suspect that in the book there might be a mismatch between stitch names and charts).