When you are a beader you dream about thread paths...

When ever I want to make a multi strand necklace I am always looking to design ways to connect the strands. This week I was dreaming about the thread paths to connect my ropes of Ndebele necklace.

In the past I have created caps like the one below:

And below I connected the strands with two bars of Tubular Peyote:

This time I came up with a way to connect the Tubular Ndebele ropes into one rope. The process looks like this: 

I started out with a row of latter stitch, and then connected it into a ring. I continued normally with a four drop Ndebele passing around twice times. I then add one more row and closing off each three columns of one color and attach each of the coordinating ropes.