Seed Bead and Tila Bead Earrings Tutorial

As my very unimaginative title suggests, this tutorial is for these delightful seed bead and tila bead earrings with beaded bicone drops.

I love working with twin hole beads but I haven’t used tila beads before. I bought these gorgeous turquoise tila beads with a gift voucher that my sister bought me for my local bead shop so these earrings are a little extra special because of that.

The video tutorial is at the end of this post.

What Are Tila Beads

If you are new to beading and/or have no idea what a tila bead is then, just to clarify, tila beads are square shaped beads with two holes running through their length on either side of the bead. Tila beads are cut in a very regular shape so they look neat and uniform when lined up together in a bead pattern.

You can also buy half tila beads and they are literally half the size of a full tila bead with the same two holes running through them.

Using beads with two holes, like tila beads give more options to your bead work as you can add other beads on to both sides of them. This allows your beading to grow in ways that wouldn’t be possible, not easily anyway, whilst also adding an interesting shape (such as a square in the case of tila beads) to add a focal element to your beading.

Beads and Supplies

Despite looking quite detailed these earrings are made with very few beading supplies.

In this bead weaving tutorial I have used:

• Toho 11/0 Permafinish Rose Gold seed beads
• Preciosa Size 11 Permalux Fuchsia seed beads
• Miyuki Tila Opaque Turquoise Tila beads Preciosa
• 5mm Preciosa Blue Zircon Bicone
• Miyuki Beading thread
• A beading needle
• Gold plated earring wires

Colour Variation and Other Options

I adore the turquoise and pink with splashes of shiny rose gold in these earrings mainly, because I am still very much in summer holiday mode, but also because bright colours make me happy.

I have however also made them in blue. The very dark blue metallic tila beads at the centre reflect various shades of green, purple and blue. They are offset with a mid toned blue and silver seed beads. The change in colour combination, in my opinion, changes the overall feel of the earrings. They altogether have a more delicate look to them and would work just as well for everyday wear as they would on a fancy evening out.

If you don’t have any bicone beads to add as a drop to your earrings you easily swap them out for faceted beads or pearls.

I have used two different brands of seed beads for the pink and turquoise earrings and, despite the size and shape of the beads being slightly different they work well together. For the blue pair I used Preciosa silver and blue seed beads. These have a slightly smaller hole running through them which did make them a little trickier when it came to tying knots!

Tila Bead and Seed Bead Earrings Tutorial

I am quite sure that there will be more tila bead patterns to come now that I have added these to my beading box.

Hannah x