Crusader Ring: Designed by Marielle Elroy

This is the Crusader Ring found in the “Beautiful Beaded Rings book. One of the girls in my local Joann’s was wearing a beautiful ring. I don’t normally get in to beaded rings, but the one she was wearing was gorgeous. Of course I had to ask her where she got the ring and she directed me to this book. I’ve sat down and looked through the book and there are some pretty patterns in here. I had trouble remembering which ring she was wearing (I think she made some modifications) so I decided to start with the Crusader Ring.

I anxiously awaited my order from Amazon (along with another bead book and an ice cream maker: Yay!) and gleefully went down to the local bead shop to snag some supplies. This is where I ran in to some trouble. The instructions called for rocaille beads. That is fine and dandy, but I don’t know what size seed beads rocaille beads are. As luck would have it, neither did any of the girls at my local bead shop. So, I made this ring with size 11 seed beads. I hope that was correct. It came together very easily and was pretty quick to boot. The one thing that I had trouble with was the outer edge of the design. It does not look anything like the photo in the book. That always frustrates me.

I wore the ring last night when I went to my favorite Indian restaurant. It sparkled beautifully in the candle light. While I sipped on my chai I decided that I was going to try to modify the pattern a bit. I was looking at the photo in the book this morning and I noticed something. In the book, the pattern clearly shows 6 beads between the 3mm bicone beads. If you look at the second photo above, you can see the 6 seed beads. However, in the photos in the book, there are only 5 seed beads between to the two 3mm bicones on the outer edge. I think this really affects how it lays. So now I have two tasks. I need to try to remake the ring so that it looks like the photo in the book, and then I also want to try to modify the pattern so that the ring is not as large.

All in all I like this pattern. I never thought I’d wear a beaded ring, but in this case I think I might!