Let your Christmas tree really sparkle this year with the contents of this book. Whatever your level of expertise, you can transform a plain bauble into a glorious, sparkling creation, and make some fun festive jewelry too.



I haven't seen the first two books in this series, but was certainly impressed with this one. A large format book in full color, it's filled with beautiful beaded baubles, and some of the best, most foolproof instructions and diagrams you will find anywhere. I can testify to this because I learnt beadwork by making up kits produced by this company, and went from a total novice to selling projects to magazines in the space of a few months. The diagrams are in color, and there are plenty of them per project covering every step with simple, easy to understand captions. There are also plenty of large format photographs showing the finished items, mostly in situ on the tree. Projects start simple, working up to more advanced pieces. Before all that is a short section on beads and tools, basic instructions for the various stitches, and other useful information such as starting a new thread, dealing with knots and finishing off. If your bauble is not exactly the same size as the one used, there are ways of getting around this, and everything in the book is available from Spellbound themselves, making shopping easy. Not all the decorations are bauble based, there are angels and stars, a beaded wreath, and some fun earrings shaped like presents, stockings, fir trees and reindeer heads. The baubles are decorated with snowflakes, butterflies, crowns (love this one), stars, icicles and more, while two of them are transformed into a Christmas pudding, and, my favorite, the owl. All this is possible by working with only a few types of easily available beads such as seed beads, fire polished faceted beads, and bugle beads, as well as some of the new multi-holed varieties. Pardon the pun, but this certainly had me spellbound, and is a great way of learning offloom stitches for other applications, as well as adding to the glory of your holiday decor. * myshelf.com *