Polymer & Beads ~ Lentil Pendants

As promised, here are some photos of my first pendants combining beading and polymer. I went back to one of my favorite polymer shapes, the hollow lentil. I used flat backs on these to provide me with an area for securing the beading thread.
One of the first things I did was to bake various beading threads. While I realized I could try to be sure the polymer portion of the bead was completely done before I did the beading, I wanted to be able to bake again if I decided something else was needed. I was pleased to find that most of the threads I usually use for beadweaving seemed to handle the heat just fine. However, Fireline, which is my favorite when beading with crystals and sharp-edged beads, just melted. Not what I would want. I particularly wanted to use Fireline for the bead above which has Swarovski gold aurum crystals, so I needed a way to be sure I wouldn't need to re-bake the polymer bead once the beadweaving was added. I worked on building a small "platform" which I embedded with eye pin tops and baked onto the back portion of the polymer bead.

Once the polymer lentil was completed and baked, I went to work adding the seed beads. The hardest part was getting the needle through the eye pin loops and back out. I had put them in to be slightly recessed so they wouldn't show through the beading. While the placement turned out to be great from that perspective, it did make getting a long beading needled into the opening, through the loops, and back out a bit tricky. As you can see from the photos, everything did work out, and I'm pleased with the results.