Trial.... and Error... *sigh* (Photo Essay for the Beading Challenge)

Well, for April's Craft Challenge I chose beads and beading. I know little about it other than taking a string and putting beads straight on it, LOL so I knew this challenge was going to TRULY be a challenge. What I didn't know was how long I'd invest... and STILL not have it right!

So, I chose the black and the purple Japanese Seed Beads to work with.

They are glass, and they do accumulate weight pretty fast. The weight after a while makes it hard to do the work as the weight tends to loosen the stitches. To keep them tight requires a bit of work and fixing but that's okay.

First loop.

Second Loop.

Third loop. So far so good!

Fourth loop - starting the pattern all over again. This part threw me, well, for a loop, LOL. The site said repeat but I couldn't vision how to go from this to the small loop. After some work... I got it!

I happily went along with the pattern memorized until I noticed something... the large loops were becoming angled and out of shape. Uhoh. What's wrong?

It turns out I added beads where they should not have been... and I could either start over by unstringing these or, just start over again.

I started over twice more... and those had to be redone. The third time was a charm and resulted in this necklace after hours and hours (and 3 days) of work.

The pattern was executed well, (especially since this is my FIRST necklace ever made other than just a straight stringing of the beads) and it pretty tight. So what's the error here?

The error is that despite having enough thread to wrap my neck three times over and then some, this necklace is woefully short. One to two inches (or so) short, to be exact.

Back to square one I go, to get it right.... on the fourth try, I hope.

How are all of your beading projects going? Feel free to post your trial and error essays as well. It's nice to see how things progress as you all learn along with me. :)