Quick Tips: Setting up a Design Board

One of the best things about working at beadshop.com is getting to speak with beaders every day about the projects they are working on. Often we get asked complicated questions about advanced techniques and subjective design decisions which spur on great conversations about someone’s project. These are always wonderful discussions, but it is just as much fun helping new beaders learn the simple things like what size leather is appropriate for their project or what a crimp bead is used for.  This series of posts is intended to help new beaders (and some of the experienced ones) with the basic techniques that we don’t always go over in our videos.

To start us off, one of the most common questions we get asked is how to set up a design board. While we do show this in various videos and handouts, it makes sense to have one definitive article that quickly answers that question.

The first thing to do is determine how large of a bracelet you will be making. For smaller projects like our Bollywood Bracelets or Stackable Ladder Bracelets, you can use the narrow axis of the board to set up your project. Longer wrap bracelets like the Mosaic Wrap Bracelets or Folklorico will require you to wrap the entire length of the board. If you are making a bracelet that is 5 wraps or longer like the In the Garden bracelet, you may want to consider using an Ultimate Design Board which can be set up in the same way.

You will need other supplies to create your bracelet, but to set up the board you only need four things: a design board, a button, your leather (or alternative base cord), and a piece of rat tail to tie your leather up to the board depending on how long your bracelet is. If the leather is long enough, you can forego the rat tail and use the excess leather to attach your bracelet.

We plan on continuing this series of articles with quick how to’s once a week. What other techniques would you like to learn? Let us know in the comments and we will do our best to make sure that even if we can not publish an article on your question, we can still get back to you with an answer. Thank you, and happy beading!