Adapt Your Dress With Wooden Beads

Wooden beads are not just for use in jewelry making, because it is possible to use these types of beads in many other arts, crafts and design projects. Many of the summer and early autumn season dresses which are available on the market at the moment actually include wooden beads in their designs. If you want to keep up with the latest trends, it is very easy to customize your existing dresses to include wooden beads. These items of clothing will then look great when they are worn to the beach or to a barbeque in the park.

Halter dress
The changes which you will make to your halter dress will not be permanent, so you will not be required to choose a dress that you are not afraid to damage. However, with this customization, you should choose a halter dress which has relatively thin straps. The thicker the straps of the dress are, the chunkier the beads that you should choose for your project. Make sure that you choose smooth beads which already have a good finish on them, or they could irritate your skin. Start by untying the straps on the dress, and removing any toggles which may be on the ends of the opposing threads. Once these have been removed, simply thread the beads onto both of the straps and add the toggle back on, to stop the beads from coming off. If there was no toggle to start with, a good, strong knot should do the trick. Your dress should now be ready to wear, and you should be able to put it on and take it off as normal.

Adapting a tube style dress
This make requires a little more work, so you may want to find an old tube dress from a charity shop. However, if you are careful, you can still unpick the straps and restore your dress to its former tube style. More delicate looking wooden beads are best for this. You will also need a needle and thread, and some fairly tensile elastic cord. Put on the tube dress and work out where you would like it to sit, and then cut two pieces of cord which are long enough to act as the straps with about 1cm of excess on either end. Sew one end of the first strap into place by carefully sewing the end onto the inside of the dress. You can then start adding beads onto the strap. Stop threading the beads on when there is about 1 centimeter left. Finish the strap by sewing the open end into the inside of the back of the dress. Repeat the whole process with the other strap, making sure that you are sewing the strap onto the right place, or you could end up with a dress which looks wonky. Once the beads are on, you may want to check that the ends of the straps are attached securely. You can then try the dress on to see if it fits properly.