Free Beaded Butterfly Bracelet Shuttle Tatting Pattern

Today I’m sharing a shuttle tatting pattern that grew out of some patterns on Pinterest that just weren’t quite what I was looking for. I loved the idea of a butterfly bracelet, but when I tried the pattern I thought I liked, it didn’t line up quite right for connecting the butterflies or adding beads to the picots. So the butterfly bracelet pattern was born, just a couple of weeks into my tatting adventures.

As a heads up, some of the links below are Amazon Affiliate Links. You can read about what that means here, but I bought and used all of these materials myself for the projects shown in this post.

Tatting Supplies

I’m still using this bundle of threads in size 8 that I got on Amazon. I’m obsessed with the rich green colors, and I wanted to make something using as many as possible.

I’m still tatting with the shuttles linked in my previous tatting post, which are teal, purple and raspberry.

The seed beads I used were from back when I was planning to incorporate them into some wire crochet. They can no longer be purchased, but they were size 15/0 (super tiny). Here’s another set that would go beautifully with the thread and is a little bit larger.

I also used a glue stick to stiffen the ends for threading beads, scissors and these gold eye needles recommend in a hiding ends video from Sparrow Spite.

Butterfly Bracelet Instructions

You are going to make your first butterfly using the pattern below. But first, string 30 beads on your thread. It also helps to stiffen the end of the thread with some glue first. I just run the thread over a glue stick a few times. I mostly see tatting instructions that dip the thread in liquid glue, but I already owned glue sticks.

To work the beads, slide the required number of beads down and onto the working thread before you make each ring. If you slide them all the way as close as you can to your hand, that’s a good position, then adjust it so the beads are behind your hand when you start working the ring. You will use 6 beads for rings 1 and 4, and 9 beads for rings 2 and 3.

The make the beaded picot, marked with the three dots on the pattern, slide 3 beads down next to the previous stitch, and make a picot just big enough for the 3 beads to fit side-by-side. When you tighten up, they will naturally form the little triangles.

Work rings 1 through 4 in the order shown. Cut the thread at the end of the butterfly and change colors. I arranged my colors in a fade that I like. This is an intentional design element, the pattern cannot be worked continuously in a single color unless you modify it to use split rings.

Next, make 6 more butterflies, joining to the previous butterfly at the picots marked with stars. Then, on the 8th butterfly, join to the previous butterfly at the ★s, and to the very first butterfly at the ‘+s.

Hide all your ends, and wet block the bracelet. You can use the blocking to coax the bracelet to be a little longer or shorter.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy the pattern! If you want to save this pattern to Pinterest for later, you can use the image below.