Bead weaving images as jewellery

As a jewellery maker, my go to material is beads. I love to use beads of various sizes, colours, shapes and materials in my jewellery. I typically string, loop or knot them and ocassionally wire wrap. But the technique that I have stayed away from apart from a few trials has been bead weaving. As a technique, bead weaving, requires incredible patience, dexterous fingers, and an analytical grasp of patterns, grids and graphs, all of which I lack. The same cannot be said for Ms. Arti Newaskar from Gwalior who excels at bead weaving images. Apart from weaving florals and animal patterns, she also custom makes beadwoven jewellery with images of Hindu Gods and faces of her clients.

Let’s meet the maker – Arti Newaskar

Arti, with her Masters in Computer Application background worked at a financial services agencies for years, until she took a break to be a stay at home mom. As her children started to get older, she discovered jewellery making techniques such as quilling and bead weaving. In the begining, she used off-Loom techniques, where she stitched beads together using only needle and thread. She made ropes, fringes, and components with geometric or floral patterns using stiches such as peyote, RAW, and herringbone stitch. However, bead woven jewellery was cheaply sold in India and the therefore she found herself facing tough competition. Eager to find a craft form that could draw from her mathematical background, she turned to bead weaving on the loom.

On the Loom bead weaving

Loom bead weaving involves the use of a bead loom, a simple device that holds the warp threads taut while beads are woven through them with a weft thread. The process allows for the creation of strikingly beautiful jewellery with precise, uniform, and flat beadwork. Using graphs to weave images in bead woven jewellery involves creating a bead pattern graph, which serves as a blueprint for the weaving process. This graph represents the design, detailing the placement and colour of each bead.

Weaving images as jewellery

Arti identifies as a designer who applies math to create stunning designs. The ability to deconstrate any visual as squares on a graph and choosing the required colours of beads to recreate the design is her speciality. She is particularly skilled in matching light and shade on the human body. She chooses her references with care and creates a story with the visuals that she used.

Banarasiya

In the last six years, Arti who began selling her jewellery through the handle beads and paper moved on from hustling sources for quality beads to setting up a brand with team of four including her. Her family supports her business endevours, and creative pursuits. Arti beams proudly, while showing me a small wooden loom created for her by her husband.

You can find her as Banarasiya on Instagram and Facebook through which she retails her creations for really affordable prices. She weaves images as jewellery on custom orders as well. If you have images that you want to convert to bead woven jewellery, then she is the one to reach out to.

I hope you find it interesting

Cheers