Making Your Own Jewelry - Materials I Use and Starting Your First Necklace

In this article I want to talk about the materials that I use, and getting started on our first necklace. What I like to do is use natural materials most of all--gem stones, seashells, maybe seeds, and stick with the metal such as sterling silver, gold filled, 14 carat gold metals in the beads. What I do is I buy mostly ones that are pre-drilled, because I'm not doing drilling here, although you can buy a piece that is not drilled and wire wrap it. We'll talk about that later. There are so many kinds of things that you can buy.

You can actually get spatial beads that are long tubed, swirly beads, straight beads and there's all kinds of things you can do-- donut shaped round beads, gold filled, sterling silver. I like to use the natural products because I also am aware that the gemstones in particular have, some people feel, their healing properties. That, to me, is what calls me to this work.

Getting started on our first necklace I thought we'd work with some very small light beads, so we are going to choose a fine wire, so that the beads can actually be thread on there without a problem. I measure it by, a lot of times, just holding it up to my neck and seeing where it falls, and then I just start stringing. Sometimes I string different arrangements on the same string of wire, just to see what section of it is looking better and it look like it works.

The ones that don't work I take those off and I kind of expand from there. You can take a larger piece and hang it from another piece of necklace. When you're hanging a bigger piece onto a necklace, you want to be able to figure out where it's going to go first before you actually make your bend, and you are going to want to use these round nose pliers to make a bend once I know that.

That's because the size of your circle that you use will depend on which size of the bead that you're going to put it next to. Once you have the necklace the way you want it to be and you're sure that you've counted your beads and that they're all even on both sides, you can go ahead and put on your clasp you start with putting a crimp bead on your wire, and then I'm going to use a trigger clasp and you'll want to thread that back around into the crimp bead, bring it up so that it's tight but not too tight. Then you use the crimping pliers. You'll squeeze this crimp bead, and it makes a crimp right in half, right in the middle, and you turn, and so one part of it is used to do that, and then at the end, it squeezes both halves together.

Give it a tug and make sure that it's holding, and trim the excess. So now you have your trigger clasp on the end of the wire. So on the other side, I like to add a length of chain, and what that will do is make it adjustable. So usually you cut off two or three inches, depending on the length of the rest of the necklace, and what we'll do again is put on the crimp bead, crimping the bead in half and then using the other end in the front to fold it. Now you can change the length of this necklace.