Cranberry and Gold

I thought I might have a silk beaded purse by the end of the weekend. Alas, I don't.  But I do have one in progress.

I looked through my 19th century pattern books and some more modern ones and just couldn't find a pattern that seemed right.  I cast on several of them but ripped them out again.  Actually there was one that I liked but I need to try the pattern on something a little larger than this silk thread to get the hang of it.  So I decided on the pattern above.  It's a repeat over 6 stitches that calls for K3, slide 1 bead, K3, slide 5 beads.  On the next round you K3, slide 2 beads, K3, slide 4 beads and so on.  On the first section you slide more beads until you get to 5 and on the second section until you get to 1 and then you go backwards. 

See what it's doing?  Making little diamonds and because over the 6 stitches you always slide some combination to make up to 6 beads, the shape of the purse is preserved.  Otherwise you would have a weird pulling and pushing according to whether you had more or less beads.  Determining the number of beads to slide is a way of increasing or decreasing the overall size of the tube.

I have to say, I'm adoring working with this silk thread and the feel of it is just wonderful.  Of course, it's very stong, too, so the sliding of the beads has not harmed the thread at all that I can tell.  I will probably just continue this until I run out of thread, since part of this experiment is to find out how much you can work with the 92 yards of thread on the spool, but I think it will work out wonderfully for a decent sized coin purse.