How to Make a Warped Hexagon

A new bead-by-bead animation from Julia Pretl that shows how to create a Warped Hexagon. We use precision cylinder beads in size 11 for most of our work, but of course any beads will work.

This animation is notable for how true-to-life it feels. Warped forms can be tangly, grumpy, and it's easy to miss step-ups when we are unfamiliar with the process. However, following these clear instructions should make it easy to learn.

We recommend a gentle, flat start, easing the increases of the second round gently into place. When the Warped Hex begins to be stable, around Round 5 or so, we fold it in half (we call this Taco Form) and then gently pull the tail thread to snug up the tension.

We continue to bead the Warped Hexes flat until they are the desired size, and then we reinforce our finish by taking a few extra stitches just with needle and thread (some people gently reinforce the entire final round) and then we weave the working thread into the body of the piece and trim.

The starting tail can be woven in the same way, gently through the beadwork, and then snugged and trimmed.

Amusingly, the Warped Hexagon is also a PodCast Bead- three points up and three down. We'll augment this video later with a bit of text and voiceover, and also at the end we will show how to flip the finished piece out of Taco Form and into a springy, minimalistic PodCast.

Have fun, and THANK YOU to Julia Pretl for another labor-intensive contribution to our open-source library of techniques. This is an old-school animation, frame by frame, from a master of geometric beadwork, and that is why it's so real, and so beautiful.

Please feel free to share, and to link to this work for a teaching resource.