Rosaries

RECENTLY a friend has pledged to donate a hundred rosaries (prayer beads) for the St. Anne's Feast in Port Klang. So guess what ? A few of us within the beading group of friends were roped in to help to make them, and of course, I'm glad to spend some quiet time with plenty of beads. I'm responsible for 10% of the lot, and that means 10 rosaries. Now, that's not a big sum you may think, but the first one I made a couple of days ago took me about three hours to complete, although I did improve on the time after the second...and the third.

Rosary beads can be linked together with cord, wire or chain, which is the most popular style among users. The technique involved for a chain rosary is basic looping. Snipping, looping and connecting, that is. Easy and straight-forward. From experience, I must say doing it is quite a test (all 100 rosaries are chain style). Siting still for hours, bending  and snipping, and then fixing them can be a little mundane, and for someone with a short attention span like me, it's really no easy task. Then, comes the chain snipping part. The cut chains, about an inch long, are needed to connect the decades to the single bead in between them, and later more are used at a rosary's pendant.

A rosary has 59 beads altogether and the bottom dangly bit has a connector and a cross pendant. Basically, it's about looping each bead and connecting them into five strands of ten (decades). The strands are then connected to a single bead (Our Father) in between them to form a long, single strand. So it goes like this: 

10-1-10-1-10-1-10-1-10 

I was given some interesting glass cubes to work with. So the outcome is a little fancy, as compared to the usual beady strands. It turns out that I'd also be making some single decade wrist rosaries  once I'm done with the 10 !

This was made by the friend