Versatile Viking Knit Necklace and Bracelet

The latest Designer Quest on the Beading Forum that I am a member of presented us with a ton of seed beads and some Czech fire polished glass crystals. Well, as you will have gathered by now I am not a seed beader so the challenge was how to incorporate them into some wirework.

I came up with the idea of stringing the seed beads into some Viking weave. This was not something I had tried before so I had no idea how it was going to turn out. The seed beads were in three colours, dark blue, light blue and a white/silver mix. There were quite a bit fewer beads of the silver mix so I decided to do stripes of three rows of dark, three rows of light and then one row of silver. As I worked I realised that the beads were helping to form the viking into a defined tube shape. So as not to lose sight of the normal viking altogether I decided to have sections of the seed beads joined by sections of plain viking.

I decided I also wanted the necklace to have more of a focal point, so I thought I would try creating a tube of viking weave that I would fill with the larger Czech beads. Again, this was a first for me. For this section I needed to create the viking around a larger mandrel so that there was still some room to draw down.

As I was working on the pieces I thought it might be fun to build some versatility into the piece, to make the focal section removable so that it could also be worn as a bracelet. I therefore matched beads and clasps on either end of both sections so that they could either be joined together and worn as one long necklace, or separated and worn as one necklace and one bracelet.

As it happens, it all took much longer than anticipated and I missed the cut off for the Designer Quest - but here is my completed piece, now available in my shop!