Beaded Snowflakes

I've found myself on a beaded snowflake kick for the a couple of days now. I know my obsessive streak is kicking in when logistics and engineering of a crafty situation begin occupying my insomnia. I was driven from my bed to my hook the other morning by mental crocheting, with badly focused video  playing in my head: various different methods of creating 3-bead trefoil picots. The blurriness of the mental video finally drove me to accept that real string would be needed to bring things into focus.

This evenings conundrum is how to get a bead to sit right on top of a stitch, thwarting it's yen to slide off toward the back of my work. If anyone has good suggestions for this, please comment. I think I may take the question to Ravelry.

First I was using my new Garden 10 thread, and some old silver-lined rochaille beads (i.e. donut shaped beads that are clear with a silver lining. Very sparkly!), found cheap at at a craft store, ages ago. Here I was playing around with variations on a design. (warning: unblocked snowflakes ahead. and unfortunately the beads are far less sparkly in this pic than in real life).

I think the simplest one, on the far right, works the best. The center on the left one is too busy. The second one isn't bad. But the third has a simple grace.

What I realized, though, was that my craft store beads sucked. They were all irregular in size, and some had wonky holes. So my friend and I placed an order at Shipwreck Beads, and I shall have good quality beads arriving with the Monday mail. And because I knew I'd go crazy waiting in the meanwhile, I picked up couple of hanks at the bead store whilst erranding downtown on Friday.

Here they are, with a couple of snowflakes I made up to test them out:

The sea-greenish ones on the left are cloudy but translucent blue-green glass, with a rainbow-y finish (Aurora Boralis). The brownish ones on the right are clear glass lined with metallic copper, precisely the beads I'd been looking for. The sea-green ones had to come home too, since they were color of sun through ice, and thus appropriate for snowflakes.

Here are better pictures of the two snowflakes. It's hard to tell in the picture, but the green-bead snowflake is made with white thread, and the copper bead snowflake with ecru (both Cebelia 20).

Tomorrow I'll make a few more of that particular snowflake, and then write down the pattern. Maybe also the rightmost of the first three snowflakes, though maybe not tomorrow.