So before you shop for your beads, you want to have an idea of how many you're going to need. And this is where the designing of the window comes. I've sketched out my window frame here, and I've found my center. Now I want my center strand to be five inches long and on the side, I'm going to come all the way out to outside the window frame, and I want that to be ten inches. And I've measured my window from the side to the center, and I've found that I have, I want to place my strands three inches apart and I have nine strands if I place them three inches apart. Okay, and then the center is the tenth, so I have nine strands and the center is the tenth. Now I'm going to just draw a line like this. My bead strands will be graduating from the five inches to the ten inches, so that's about a one half inch shortening for each strand. Okay. So I'll have the nine strands and we want to estimate how many beads we're going to need before we go to the store. Now I want to have a focal bead in the center. I'm only using one large focal bead and this is a focal bead. Something very large, larger than any of the other beads, that will draw your attention to one spot. I'm going to have one focal bead in the center. So we'll have that. Then I'm going, I have nine strands going to the center, and I want to have nine pennant beads, or end beads. And these are pennant beads, and they come in all different sizes. You can also use large beads like this, that will also, can also serve as an end bead. And then we want to estimate is how many clusters. I'm not going to string my strands all the way down with beads. I want to bead it in clusters, and this is what a cluster would look like. Three or four beads, different sizes. Usually like one large one and some small ones or graduating. Large to small. You can use little small colorful beads going on the sides of another color bead. Little bursts of color. And I'm going to put them about three or four inches apart on the strands with empty space in between. So I estimated maybe three to four clusters per strand and then you just multiply that out to figure out how many clusters you'll need and if you're using three to four beads per cluster, you multiply that out to estimate how many beads you're going to need. And then you're ready to go shopping for your beads.
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