New Octahedral Cluster Kit

We have a new kit available for the Octahedral Cluster Beaded Bead.  It's got some pretty marbled pink seed beads and a black lace overlay.  I call the color scheme "Black Lace Rose."  This is still one of my all-time favorite designs because it is so round and symmetric.  I still remember the day I designed the very first one back in the Spring of 2005.  I had already patterned the Seven Sisters beaded pendant, with a big 7-star on the front, and I wondered if I could make a beaded bead with 4-stars, six of them oriented like the faces of a cube. For a long time, I had no idea if this new beaded bead design was a cube or an octahedron, but I later decided that it was an octahedron because for the 12 largest beads, their holes lie on the edges of an octahedron.  I also made a couple different versions of a Cube Cluster, but I never liked the way the beads fit together in that version.  The beaded bead was squishy and the shape was not as round as I like.

Last Fall, I was asked by the editors of Beadwork Magazine to submit a beaded bead design for their contest on beaded beads, and at that point, I reworked the Cube Cluster design until I got something nice and round like the Octahedral Cluster, but significantly larger.  In the April/May 2012 issue of Beadwork Magazine, I will finally be publishing my pattern for the Cube Cluster Beaded Bead.  So keep an eye out for it.