Bead Crochet Revisited

Wow I seem to be touching this blog only once a year. 

Been busy again and now I'm having a bit of time to myself. Unfortunately I haven't been able to continue working on my queued / planned beading projects lately. 

I did start to work on a bead crochet rope bangle project, and after at least a dozen trials and errors, I think I have finally come up with a pretty good output. 

I started doing bead crochet ages ago but the widest I've done was only 8 beads around. This time I'm attempting a 15-around project. 

After a lot of bumpy (really ugly!) starts this is what is looks so far. 

As you can see I started out with a sort of "tail" (not the thread tail) made up of non-beaded single crochet stitches also done in a spiral of the 15 required stitches, just so I have something to hold on to. I found this technique on Pinterest and it's from a Russian website. 

What this "tail" start also does is it fixes up that crucial beginning row of beads so that it all lines up quite nicely immediately as you go along. 

This is how my initial attempt looked like: 

As you can see the first row at the bottom is all gnarly. It would have been tricky to join this end to the finished end in an invisible join, which I'm planning (hoping) to do. 

I'm using a jonquil light yellow and a blue shade size 11/o seed bead color combination. Will post the pattern as soon as I can find it again (and find out if I'm allowed to do so). 

By the way, if you notice my beads are al diagonal instead of flat like it would usually lie in most of the English tutorial sites that I've seen, and even on Bead and Button Magazine tutorials and articles. I got a bit intrigued with this diagonal technique, which I scoured Pinterest for. 

I found a tutorial on a Spanish website (will update this post to include that link) that shows how it's done. 

Basically the main difference is that instead of bead slip stitches, it uses single crochet stitches and that causes the beads to lie at an angle. It's quite different and  I like it. 

Now I still have yet to find a tutorial for an invisible join in this technique. Will keep you posted.