Friday 14 January 2011

Funky Friday Fun

Hi all, as promised please find a mini project on making your own wire beads using either our coloured jewellery wire below or our 0.4mm silver or gold plated wires.  There is minimal difference between the two wire gauges, the 0.4mm (which we've used in the pictures below) makes a slightly larger bead and is a little harder on your hands but still gives great results.  The 0.315mm is softer to work with and give you more flexibility on the size of your beads - hence why we have started stocking this in the colours. 


All wire, beads and finding used in the mini project are available on our websire http://www.beadelicious-beads.co.uk/



To make these fabuloulsy simple beads cut a piece of jewellery wire approx 75cm to 1m in length - this will give you a bead roughly 10mm - 12mm in size.

Fold the wire in half in your hands and scrunch the wire into a large ball-ish shaped mess.
Put the mess ball into the palm of your hands and using both hands roll together in a rotating motion - feel the wire in your hands becoming a smaller, tighter formed ball.

Keep checking your wire bead as you roll it smaller and tighter together.  If you see a large gap in the wire ball anywhere use your pliers to move a piece of wire into place and carry on rolling until you achieve the desired size bead.  Make sure all wire ends are tucked inside the bead.

Make a few beads up and work into your designs.  Here we've used them with our 10mm Light Silver and Dark Grey pearls and spacer beads on a bracelet.

2 comments:

  1. How long does the wire need to be? I'm guessing it's 1mm thick instead of long... Please let me know I think this is a really interesting project!

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  2. Hi
    Ideally between 75cm to 1m. I made a boo boo on the descriptions - the wire I use is 0.315mm or 0.4mm in thickness and you need 75cm to 1m depending on the size of the bead you want to make. Thanks for the spot, just off to correct the description now :)

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