When you are knitting with beads you have a great possibility to decide how much the bead knitting beads are going to change the look of the finished item. You can use a lot of beads, almost in every second stitch, or only a random bead here and there to give the knitting an unexpected look. When you want to create specific patterns of bead knitting beads, the easiest method to keep track of your progress is to follow bead knitting patterns. Bead knitting patterns may indicate exactly what sizes and colors of beads you should use or give a little more freedom to your own creativity. The bead can be made of almost any material thinkable. The most common material is glass, plastic and ceramic but there are also beads of wood, terracotta, clay raku, metal and more. Also the forms the bead knitting beads are produced in offers possibility to choose through the whole geometric spectrum. The beads can be round and spheroidal, flat, oblong, hexagonal or triangular, only to mention a few of the existing forms.
The most common beads to use in beaded knitting are called seed beads. These bead knitting beads are made of glass and mass produced from tubes. Seed beads are flat at the ends and not, as a contrary, round as pearls. When stringing the bead knitting beads onto the yarn you may experience that the sizes of the holes can be very different though the beads are of the same size. This is a result especially occurring when the beads are handmade but also a common mistake from fabric production. It may help to sort the beads before stringing them. Large beads sometimes have very little holes!
Now you know that you can choose your bead knitting beads regarding material and form but of course the most striking appearance of the beads is their color. The seed beads of glass can be transparent or translucent meaning that you can see through the glass or that the light gets diffused through the glass. If no light can pass through the bead its opaque. The finish of the bead knitting bead can be matte or clear and have luster like a pearl. The surface can have a spectrum of colors like a rainbow; this is called Aurora Borealis (AB). Finally, the bead knitting beads can be color lined. That means that a thin layer of color, often metallic, on the inside. Some examples of color lining colors are silver, bronze and copper. The layers reflect the light and gives the sense of a shine of, in turn, white, brown and red light. Since the layer is applied on the inside of the bead it’s sometimes not very durable. The more the thread or yarn is rubbed trough the bead knitting bead, the more the layer is loosened.