I’m not a Nymo fan. I love the colour range but I can’t seem to get the hang of working with it. It frays, it stretches, it splits, and it goes fluffy. Having started out my beading obsession with good old quilting cotton it was a bit difficult to make the transition. I just never really took to the stuff.
Quilting cotton has some serious limitations though. It rots and knots and snaps if you put a little too much pressure on it. I needed an alternative. Enter Fireline. Everyone seems to use it for one thing or another and, other than those who work with sharp crystals, nobody seems to have much bad to say about it. I ordered a little roll of 6lb crystal line and I couldn’t wait to try it out.
A short while into the project I decided that all the beaders of the world were nuts! I had kinks and bright white stress marks and very very sore fingers. It was like trying to wrangle a very thin and belligerent serpent. I honestly couldn’t figure out how this had ended up being the thread of choice.
After a few false starts I settled on using it to make little rows of brick stitch around some fat black rubber o-rings. It looked good, but because of the stress marks through the Fireline, the thread really stood out. A quick Google revealed that Fireline was also available in a dark colour called smoke. Another quick Google revealed that smoke was available in a few different weights, including 4lb. People said that 4lb was much like working with cotton that just didn’t knot. Knotless cotton? Maybe this was the magical Fireline that everyone has been talking about.
It took 4 stores and 3 suburbs, but eventually a spool was located in Anaconda, dusty and hiding behind oodles of spools of neon pink and green. I took it home and got to work. It was WONDERFUL! No kinks, no stress marks, no knots, no dissapointments!
The tricky thing with the lack of knotting is that when you actually do need to join one piece of Fireline to another, you need to go and flutter your eyelashes at the closest fisherman and get a quick lesson in joining lines. I wish I’d known how to tie blood knots years ago!
Ordinarily I’d be wary of taking this bracelet out and about, but ordinarily I’d have made it using quilting cotton or Nymo. This version feels strong enough to wear around town without feeling like it is made of cardboard.
So there you go. Fireline is pretty impressive stuff, providing you get the right weight for the job. Seems really simple when you think about it but sometimes it is easy to overlook the obvioius.
