The dangers of peyote

Peyote? That's the cactus, right? The one that produces mescaline?

Actually, not in this case. I'm not planning a screed against mind-altering substances here (not that I'm interested in taking them myself, since I can quite happily manage to be as strange as anyone wants, but under full conscious control). And I will, in fact, admit I'd never even heard of the cactus until just now, when I went to look for a link on peyote beading and found my screen full of cactus-related material. Well, you live and learn.

I did peyote beading precisely once. It is a simple technique; if you click the link, you can learn how to do it. You get neat alternating rows of seed beads (it is possible to use larger beads, but seed beads are normal), like brickwork, so it lends itself well to designs with diagonal lines. And I enjoyed doing it. I can't remember now exactly what I made, but it was quite a large piece.

And therein lay the problem. Seed beads are made of glass. One seed bead on its own weighs almost nothing, but when you have a lot of them together, they're quite heavy. If I were to do it now, I'd know to use specialist beading thread, or, at the very least, nylon "invisible" thread, which is practically unbreakable under normal strains; but I used ordinary sewing thread, and it wasn't strong enough. The thread broke, the whole thing fell apart everywhere, and I was fishing odd seed beads out of corners for weeks afterwards. Needless to say, that put me off peyote for a very long time.

Some time later I went up to visit my parents in Kendal, which I used to do fairly regularly; it's a reasonably easy train journey from Sheffield, where I was living. And my mother asked me if I knew about the craft shop. I said, "No, tell me about it."

The craft shop was in either the Old or the New Shambles, I can't remember which; these are two roughly parallel lanes running between Finkle Street and the market place, and they've always been pedestrian only, because you couldn't physically get a car up them. So they tend to attract interesting little shops. It turned out that this craft shop hadn't been there for too long but it was already closing down, so it had a sale on. Well, you can imagine. Obviously I had to go and look at this place.

I picked up a number of things there, including some roving for spinning (which perhaps I shall post about later, but for now I'll just say that of all the crafts I've ever tried, spinning is one of the very few I turned out to be spectacularly bad at), and no doubt various things like embroidery threads, buttons, trims, you name it. And then I spotted the bead loom. If I recall correctly, it was half price. I had a good look at it and I thought, "That has to be more stable than peyote. I'm going to give it a try."

Well, yes. It is vastly more stable than peyote, because you haven't got just one thread holding the beads in place; you have a web. However, as you can see from the photo, the arrangement of the beads is different. Rather than forming a brickwork pattern, the beads sit directly on top of one another, so this form of beadwork lends itself much better to orthogonal lines than diagonals... so it's great for lettering. (Bach, by the way, is my joint favourite composer, but weaving "HENRY PURCELL" would have been somewhat slower.) So which type you choose is going to depend partly on the size and shape of the piece, but also partly on what sort of pattern you want to work.

If you look closely at the bead loom, you will notice two things. One is that the beads don't sit on the warp threads, but between them; this is because you add them to the weft thread. The other is that the weft thread is on a needle. The beads are threaded on one at a time (unlike, say, beaded knitting, where you thread all the beads onto your yarn before you start to work) and woven in individually, which is why there is no heddle. The needle does all that. So it is not a very quick technique - possibly a little slower than peyote - but if it does break, you will lose only a few beads rather than the whole thing disintegrating spectacularly all over your living room, and you can repair it invisibly with a little care.

And, while we're talking about beads, let me show you what I did yesterday:

The unakite necklace turned out to be annoying, at first. I could have sworn I bought enough of the beads to make a decent necklace without having to worry about the spacers, but in fact I had only one rather short strand. I did a few calculations and worked out that if I interspersed them with the gold delicas I could get a strand long enough, so I did that, knotted it off... and then found it wouldn't go over my head. I suspect the nominal measurement of the beads was a little out. I don't think they are 6 x 8 mm. (For comparison, the red crystals are also given as 6 mm; just from eyeballing, I'd say the unakite was more like 4 x 6.) So I heaved a sigh, cut the thread, and restrung the whole lot with added 2 mm pearls... which I will not use again. They're very pretty and they work well as spacers, but if I want beads that size again I'll use seed beads, because the holes in the pearls are so small that it can be a struggle to get the needle through. And it is a proper beading needle, so it's as fine as it could be.

The bead loom, of course, vanished in 2016. Now I have decent beading thread, I might pick up the peyote again at some point... who knows? But if I do, I shall do so with great caution!