With wedding season on the way, we’ve been looking back on a very special family event: our daughter’s marriage last September.
The bride’s beautiful dress wouldn’t have been complete without bespoke beaded jewellery created to show it off so, in addition to my role as mother of the bride, I also became jewellery-maker-in-chief!
It was certainly a challenge, but with every bead and fixing in our workshop at our disposal, I was given the couple’s trust to create couture pieces that would befit the bride’s elegant ‘fit-and-flare’ dress with floral lace embellishment.
A necklace design called Lacey proved to be just the thing, and in collaboration with our Czech artisanal bead maker, we created an exquisite pair of drop bead earrings to go with it. With the addition of a Floris bangle and beaded yarn purse made by my mother, our daughter was ready to walk down the aisle.
If you’re keen to fashion some wedding sparkle this year, these are the pieces we chose to help the dress sing.
The Bangle
With the bride favouring fine and delicate jewellery, I began investigating colour blends for the Floris bangle design. The Floris, with its Cubic Right Angle Weave, or CRAW stitch, is embellished with tiny four petal seed bead flowers and just the thing to rock with the style and detail of the dress. We finally settled on flowers fashioned from White Lustre and Gold Metallic 9/0 Preciosa seed beads, nestling into dainty Clear Iris Matt 5/0 Preciosa seed beads, an ethereal composition.
Spiral Drop Czech Glass Lampwork Bead Earrings
A special bead for a special purpose! We love the creative possibilities that arise from working with our artisan glass bead maker.
With the fluid droplet shape of the Spiral Drop bead reflecting the flowing, curvaceous style of the bride’s dress, it was the obvious option to explore for a pair of show-stopping earrings. Collaboration with our bead maker to come up with the perfect colour resulted in our opal glass and silver ‘Silver Birch’ Spiral Drop Czech Glass Lampwork Bead, complemented by handcrafted loops of sterling silver wire work and anchoring wires. The beads are now available on our website in packs of two and six.
White Opal Radiance Lacey Necklace
Working in harmony with the sweetheart neckline of the bride’s dress, the Lacey necklace was perhaps the focal point of the bridal jewellery. Although delicate and intricate, it’s a straightforward design suitable for experienced beginners. My favoured tools for this one are patience and a fine needle!
The Lacey is created from units of size 11/0 seed beads formed into billowing diamond shapes, stitched together with a very fine diameter thread. Each set of one and two units has our beautiful and unique Czech Crystal Bohemica Bicone 4mm White Opal (010) Radiance2 beads suspended and secured in place by one of our gold fairy beads in a size 13/0 (1 ¼mm) Charlotte.
Bridal beaded purse
This pretty beaded yarn purse was knitted by my mother and was just the thing to keep all the essentials handy on the big day: make-up, trinkets and tissues, and of course the bridal mobile phone! For a traditional bride, it’s also the ideal place to stash a few of the items on the ‘Something borrowed...’ list.
The phrase “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue” originated in 19th-century Lancashire, England and describes the items a bride should have on her wedding day to bring good luck.
Something old: Represents a tie to the past and continuity with the bride’s family and heritage
Something new: Symbolises hope and optimism for the future
Something borrowed: usually an item borrowed from a happily married friend or relative and is believed to bring good luck for the union and even fertility
Something blue: Was meant to ward off the evil eye and also stood for love, purity, and fidelity.
The rhyme concludes with “a sixpence in your shoe,” which was intended to bring prosperity to the couple.
Express yourself
If you’re planning to create some bridal jewellery and would like some help matching designs and colours to dress styles, do get in touch.
Please do share photos of your finished projects with us on Facebook, we’re always thrilled to find out what you’ve been creating.
Say hello!
If you’re in the area, do call in and say hi! Our shop is located between Aiskew and Beadale in North Yorkshire, the gateway to the beautiful Yorkshire Dales, and we’re now open on Saturdays. All the information you need to plan your visit is on our Google business page.
Kate, Jonathan and all the team at Boundless Beads.
About Boundless Beads
Established in 1992, we are a UK-based, family-run business. We supply exquisite artisan beads and beautifully hand-crafted jewellery elements to the hobbyist market and to wholesale partners up and down the country.
We are privileged to work closely with some of the industry’s best glassworkers and bead-makers, many of whom hail from the world-renowned Bohemian dynasties of the Czech Republic. Many of the beads we sell are entirely unique to our collections and can be found nowhere else in the marketplace. Please visit us at