As promised, here’s a cool and breezy bracelet to accompany your Ocean Breeze earrings we made last week. This one will challenge your skills a little, but nothing you can’t handle, I’m sure. Still, I hope you had a good night’s sleep!
Okay, let’s get started. Round up your tools: chain-nose pliers, round-nose pliers and wire-cutters. You’re also going to need a small handful of silver headpins, and silver jump rings — a few square ones, but a good number of round ones (smaller ones and larger ones), a lobster clasp, and a good mixture of beads — blue and purple Swarovski crystals, glass beads in various shades of blue and, of course, more of those lovely lampwork beads that were in last week’s earrings.
Here’s what our objective is: we want to connect all our beads together using the jump rings and head pins. We’ll then add additional beads to the larger, round jump rings, once we have the main structure assembled. Trust me, it will be fun.
First things first: I recommend getting the more challenging stuff done first, and then you can relax a little.
So, let’s start with some wire twisting. Your smallest beads will be the ones that will dangle from the jump rings, and we’re going to use the head pins to wrap them, so they will really stand out. Get all your small beads onto headpins, and make a loop in it, but leave an extended tail, as shown.
Gripping the eye of the pin firmly with your chain-nose pliers, wrap the tail around the bead, away from your body, as shown.
Snip off the excess wire, snipping as close to the bead as possible and, using your chain-nose pliers, press the wire in firmly against the bead.
Once you’ve done that with all of your small beads, set this group of wire-wrapped beads aside.
Next we’ll make double eye-pins for our larger beads, using headpins. Well, sort of. We’re going to snip off the ‘heads’ of the headpins we’ll use in this segment of the bracelet. Once that’s done, we’re left with a small piece of wire.Make a loop at one end, slide your bead on and make a loop of equal size at the other end, adjusting for size, as needed, and snipping off any wire you don’t need. Now, put the beaded double eye-pins aside. Finally, we can start connecting!
Let’s go ahead and connect the clasp to a beaded double eye-pin using a smaller, round jump ring. Now, begin opening your larger, round jump rings, and connecting the beaded double eye-pins to them. Continue with this until all your beaded double eye-pins are connected by way of the larger, round jump rings.
Once that phase is done, you’ll go back to your wire-wrapped smaller beads and, using your smaller, round jump rings and your square jump rings, you’ll begin to connect these beads to the larger, round jump rings using two crystals and one glass bead on each of the large jump rings. You’ll use a beaded double eye-pin and connect it to a wire-wrapped crystal bead (both of which hang from a larger jump ring), as a tail that will hang down decoratively once the bracelet is fastened. This bracelet is adjustable. too! The lobster clasp can connect to any jump ring for the best fit. Enjoy!