This week, we have a spiral rope necklace kit from Queenbeads. In all fairness, if you know the spiral rope stitch, a jewellery kit is completely unnecessary. But I am a newbie when it comes to beading techniques, and this comes with a lot of beads; more beads than you probably need. Perhaps matching jewellery is in order?

Let’s do the usual “look at the contents”. There are three different colours of themed seed beads, a spool of nylon thread, and a needle, with a coloured instruction booklet and an organza bag to store the finished product.

So it turns out the spiral rope stitch is very easy. You choose one colour as the core bead (in this case, black) and other beads will lie next to it. The pattern spirals up and down the string of core beads.

However, I’ve not strung up a whole necklace before and it does take quite a while… On the first night I started this, I was disappointed to see how much I had done in a few hours… Maybe if I had more concentration, it would only take a few hours to finish the whole project.

This particular version does not have a clasp, so the necklace had to be long enough to go over my head. The stitch joins seamlessly together. A lot of thread went into this! I must have cut at least nine metres of thread.

The finished necklace was about 70cm in length when measured straight, and sits comfortably around my neck. The spiral rope stitch is great! It can be used to greater effect when the non-core beads are larger in size or of non-circular shapes. I’ll be sure to try out some bracelets or straps with this.