Wednesday, June 17, 2015

A Touchy Subject.

I am talking about design collisions.  In the beading world this is a very touchy subject and I do want to clear up a predominant issue.  Can design collisions be avoided?  No!  They are bound to happen.  There are so many beading designers out there compared to the amount of stitches that exist.


I also want to be clear this post is not about copying that is a separate issue altogether.  In my opinion copying is intentional.  When getting to the stage that I am with beading it is more fun to dump some beads on your tray and start playing, using the knowledge I have gained from the vast amount of great bead designers out there.  A stitch can be manipulated or other beads can be incorporated in a new way to make a design your own.  Even use of a different thread path can create a new design.  However, once I have come up with something I that would consider making a tutorial the next step is to see if someone already thought of it.

Sometimes it is real easy if you are designing with new to the market beads.  A few searches on Pinterest, Google and even Etsy and you know right away you can claim it as your design.  Like this one.


I still have to get some more crescent beads and kheops to write the tutorial but you get the idea.

Sometimes it is very hard.  In the seed beading community there are so many tags and descriptions that it is impossible to search them all.

A few months ago I thought I was pretty clever coming up with this design.

It is a really awesome thread path inspired by a stitch called pondo.  I had run out of the beads so I set it aside with the intention of writing a tutorial.  One day, you know those days you can get lost on Pinterest, I was just searching for inspiration and came across this blog post from Gwenbeads.

Yep she did it first.  Whew I didn't jump the gun and publish.  My lesson learned in that is when researching I need to follow this checklist.


  • Search all possible stitch descriptions
  • Search all possible names and descriptions of beads
  • Check all bead manufactures web pages because they may have design inspiration teams.


With that said even then you may run into a design collision.  It is bound to happen.  If you do come across one of these collisions and want to let your favorite designer know, please contact them privately to make them aware.  Any GOOD designer wants to know and will take the appropriate steps to fix the error.  Just know that there are so many designers that want to inspire and share their knowledge with you and only so many stitches.  Relax it is all for fun and creative sharing.


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