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In my experience, six things can cause this:
1) Pulling too tight. Not an issue based on what you are saying.
2) Beading on something that is not padded enough to 'cup' the beads and keep them from slipping - like bare wood or glass. If you absolutely must bead on something smooth, waxing your thread heavily and wrapping a few times around every 1/3-1/2 in will help keep it from slipping. But, it is much better to pad surface, even a little ultrasuede will work.
3) Having too many or too few beads to go around the object you are beading. Care need to be taken with the selection of the number of beads.
4) Not going back through the last bead when you finish a row and just starting straight into the new row. This causes a cumulative loose area, spiralling around the piece. This will twist your design, slowly but surely.
5) Badly matched bead sizes. I have had real problems with this with the tiny antique beads I use. You need to make a real effort to keep beads you use close to the same size. In Czech beads, dark reds, dark greens, and whites seem to be thinner than is usual for a given size and med blue and some yellows and oranges are thicker. In really severe cases of size mismatch, you can occassionally use two thin beads, instead of one to even out the tension. I had to do this on a recent peice of mine, where the only red I had in 18/o was very thin.
6) The extra bead (usually about three days worth of work back). Sometimes an extra bead creeps in and doesn't get noticed until you're trying to figure out why the design is crooked. I have seen brave souls snap the offedning bead with an awl. The two times I tried this I: a) created a tension problem in the form of a nice loop of danglely white thread, 2) cut right through the thread with the sharp glass fragments. My teacher destained this method and told me to slap anyone who had their nose close enough to my work to see it. Me I just pick it out if it is really a problem.
Anyway, that's my $0.02.
OLChemist
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