A Flat Version

Fox's comments yesterday started me thinking about making a flat version of Marie Smith's beaded 'fabric'. First design problem to think about: on row 3 the second shuttle for the split ring will be on the wrong side. A single shuttle split ring should solve that. If there's a SSSR on one side, I may as well do the same on both sides and work with one shuttle.  Then to decide about the foundation row. I thought of just doing rings of 6ds, but that wouldn't be very stable. They need to be joined to each other.

I wound a shuttle with thread and beads and began. Turns out you can't add a bead to the opening of a SSSR.  Do a SSSR without a bead? That didn't really work, because it stuck out too much. A bare space of thread? Bit boring. How about adding a bead to that? Yes, that works fine.

Then I struggled with the foundation row. On the first attempt, it looks as though there's an extra ring sticking out. A ring without a bead? No. Same solution as before, just a bead on bare thread.

Because the rings join onto the spaces between the rings of the previous row, it's important to watch that you get the same number of rings in each row. The solution is to join the last ring to the beaded space.

I think this works, but I'd be happy to hear any suggestions for improvement.