Once the patterning was figured out and transferred onto the fabric it was time for sewing the pearls on. Hours, and hours, and hours, and oh yea.... hours of pearl sewing. About 16 months of pearling! Isabella has a regular job so it had to be done in the evening and weekends. Along the way she learned a few things. If you are interested in some her thoughts, please keep reading.....

While making this sleeve I started using a beading needle however, because it is so long it was hard to handle.  It had to go through two beads to secure them, through the velvet, and then back through to place another bead. The needle will bend and break if you're not careful. After trying a variety of needle types I settled on using a very thin regular sewing needle.  It had to be small enough to go through the beads smoothly without breaking them, even with a row of thread already through it.

In the middle of making the sleeves we noticed that the velvet was being pulled by the beads.  We realized the the velvet wasn't heavy enough to handle the weight of the pearls on its own.  We decided that it was best to add an interfacing.  We used a regular cotton fabric as that is what we had on hand.

While sewing the beads on, it is best if you sew about a half inch in front of every bead because they will bunch up if they are sewn too close together.

Once the sleeves were finished we weighed them.  They weigh three pounds and twelve ounces EACH.  The actual sleeves probably had a different weight as they probably would have used real pearls, while we used glass ones.