Swarovski Virtual Bead Board Online Jewelry Designer

I don’t work with high quality Swarovski crystal beads as much as I’d like to when I’m designing my bead jewelry, but I’ve recently discovered how I can create virtal jewelry patterns online using Swarovski crystals and have fun at least imagining I can afford to always work with the really expensive stuff.

It’s the Swarovski Virtual Bead Jewelry Design Tool! It’s not part of the regular Swarovski.com website, but rather its own tool on a special “Create Your Style With Swarovski” website. The whole website is actually filled with some neat ideas and information about the company and its products.

This virtual Bead Board is actually pretty straightforward and a little less complex to use than some of the others I’ve featured in this blog. Visit the site and go to the Design Tool portion. Scroll down through the brief instructions and click on the link to start the tool. You will need to have FLASH installed for this one to work.

All you do is choose what type of bead you want on the left, choose the appropriate shape, color and size. Then you go up top and choose a tool to use with that bead. You can place individual beads, you can draw a line of beads or you can even draw a circle of beads. Best of all, you can undo your actions if you don’t like them!

There are a few template of existing jewelry you can load, but those are very, very complex and filled with hundreds of Swarovski beads. After you’ve made your piece of jewelry you can view and print a materials list and even save the design and load it later.

There are few drawbacks to this designer. It is really simple and doesn’t have nearly the same amount of functionality as some of the other virtual bead boards I’ve seen. This one, for example, doesn’t even both with wire or stringing material. It just floats the beads in space, which I suppose is okay for putting together simple ideas that are all beads. There are also no “non crystal” beads, so if you want to include little spacer beads or anything not made of crystal, you can’t do it here. The types and sizes of crystals are also kind of limited to only four types of bead shapes, two types of pendants and one type of pearl.

Don’t get me wrong, though. It’s still a lot of fun to play with! I’m sure I haven’t figured out all the little tricks with it, yet. It doesn’t replace going to the bead store and looking at real Swarovski crystals, but it’s certainly a little more convenient and a lot cheaper!

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