How to Bead a Chinese a Strawberry Heart in the Easiest Possible Way - and FAST! Beading Tutorial

An elegant shape - that's easy to make. Just in time for Valentine's Day. But wearable all year 'round.

Stitch all 7 rows in about an hour or so. Turn your Strawberry Hearts into elegant earrings - or use them as lariat ends. Once you've mastered the basic technique, invent your own variation.

If you're new to beading, welcome. You can do this technique. Just set aside one quiet hour - and watch your heart structure take shape.

Each Chinese Strawberry Heart takes 168 beads - plus 1-3 beads for the bottom tip.

In this video, I used American-made metal seed beads in size 8/0. For the Strawberry Heart Earrings in the thumbnail photo, I used size 11/0, which create a lightweight heart that's perfect for earrings. The 8/0 beads create a heavier heart that most ear lobes won't like.

You can find these metal seed beads on Etsy in the Bead Parlor Beads Shop linked below. Just search for "metal beads." (I am not affiliated with Bead Parlor Beads, although I love their selection!)
https://www.etsy.com/shop/BeadParlorB...

Chinese Strawberry Heart - Video Time Stamps:
Introduction: 00:08
Rows 1 & 2: 01:29
Row 3: 06:41
Row 4: 16:20
Row 5: 25:54
Row 6: 34:44
Row 7: 41:58
The Bottom Tip: 46:03

I learned this technique from a large, plastic-bead model strawberry I bought in China a long time ago. The Chinese strawberry was too large to show in this video, but I'll try to show it in a future video. In any case, the plastic bead strawberry was dotted with black beads to represent seeds.

Without seeds, this structure looks like a heart. So I named it the "Strawberry Heart." There are other kinds of Chinese beaded hearts too - maybe you know some of them. Two are worked in right angle weave. One is flat and wide open in the middle. Another is puffy and full.

Right angle weaved is NOT involved in the Chinese Strawberry Heart, which uses cells shaped like hexagons, pentagons and heptagons. There is no generally accepted name for this technique but it belongs to a large class of structures known as "bead polyhedra."

Chinese beaders have invented dozens, if not hundreds, of bead polyhedra since the start of the 21st century, when plastic beads became widely available in China thanks to China's booming petrochemical industry.

To learn more about beading in China, you can visit my articles on academia.edu. Some can get pretty technical, but all have color photos of amazing historical pieces. Here are some links:

"Chinese Bead Curtains, Past and Present" (2013):
https://www.academia.edu/36044083/_Ch...

"Mainland Chinese Export Beadwork" (2017):
https://www.academia.edu/36085656/_Ma...

"Beaded Shop Signs in Republican Beijing" (2018):
https://www.academia.edu/36484630/_Be...

"A Beaded Hair Comb of the Early Ming Dynasty" (2021):
https://www.academia.edu/66974640/A_B...

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