All about jewellery making

Mei of WireBliss kindly honoured my blog with the Arte Y Pico Award.  Thank you Mei - here it is proudly displayed:

It is now my turn to select five blogs to receive this award.  These are all blogs that I enjoying reading and are written by some wonderfully creative people.  Here goes:

Amari Jewellery
ArtMagick
Bittersweet
Homebug
PlanetJune

The rules for passing the award on are (you can copy & paste):

1.  You have to pick 5 blogs that you consider deserve this award for creativity, design, interesting material, and also contributes to the blogging community, no matter of language.

2.  Each award has to have the name of the author and also a link to his or her blog to be visited by everyone.

3.  Each award-winning blog has to show the award and put the name and link to the blog that has given her or him the award itself.

4.  Award-winning and the one who has given the prize have to show the link of ‘Arte Y Pico’ blug, so everyone will know the origin of this award.

5.  Show these rules.

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When inspiration for your jewellery making projects is slow why not take inspiration from your wardrobe and use it as an opportunity to accessorize?  Individualised accessories can turn plain into perfection!  Recently I turned to my felt stash to create this funky flower brooch…..

to compliment this bold retro print top:

Inspiration was taken from one flower from which I made my own paper pattern.  I layered up the felt embellishing it with my favourite embroidery stitch - chain stitch.  The introduction of metallic thread keeps it up-to-date and the addition of a brooch bar on the back provides maximum versatility for positioning on the garment.

Accessorizing is fun, looks good and makes you feel great!

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Many people get married in the summer so I thought I would write a tutorial for some earrings that would be suitable for brides and/or bridesmaids.  This design is very quick and simple to make.  Here’s what you need:

2x   6 inch lengths of 26 gauge wire
1x   pair of ear wires
2x   focal bead (8mm)
20x  Swarovski crystal bicone beads, 4mm (I used 8x vintage rose, 8x chrysolite and 4x clear)
26x 3mm pearl beads (I used ivory)
1x   6mm pearl bead
1x   4mm metallic bead
Round nose pliers
Flat nose pliers
Wire cutters

1.  The first step is to thread the beads that form the main loop of the earring.  Here is a diagram to show you how:

2.  Once you have the beads in the desired order draw both ends of the wire towards each other and make a neat and tight wrapped loop at the top.  You will need to trim the wire that you have used to create the wrap so that you end up with a wrapped loop bearing a single wire out of the top like so:

3.  The next thing you have to do is to cover the wrap you have just made.  To do this take the 6mm pearl bead and thread it onto the wire.  Hold the wire with your flat nose pliers and pull the bead down firmly to cover the wrap.  When you have done this then thread on the 4mm metallic bead followed by the 3mm pearl and finally create a wire wrapped loop at the top to hang the earring from the ear wire (see diagram below).  Repeat for the other earring.

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Being an organised sort of person I am always on the lookout for great storage ideas. How could I possibly resist this beautiful green velour box with ideally sized divisions I found lurking in a charity shop for £2.99? It didn’t look as if it had ever been used and came complete with key and lock. Such luxurious storage surely begs to be filled with extra special beads so it contains the more sparkly, glamorous and pricey items amongst my bead shop stock.

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Despite their strikingly complicated appearance beaded spiral ropes are in fact really quite easy to produce.  Not only do they offer the opportunity for experimenting with the most glorious colour schemes but they are very satisfying to make, especially since there is so much scope for variation by altering the sizes of the beads involved in the project.

For simplicity’s sake I am going to show you how to make the basic beaded spiral.  You can see from the examples of beaded spiral ropes that I have previously posted that alternative sizes of beads have indeed been used.

N.B.  Before you begin you need to make a brief assessment of your materials since the thread used will need to pass through the core beads more than once.  Sometimes, depending on the beads and the thickness of the thread used (I usually use Nymo), I pass the thread through each section of the spiral rope twice (meaning that the core beads contain three thicknesses of thread whilst the beads that ‘climb’ the rope only contain two) as this provides extra stability.  You need to judge what is best for your particular piece.

For the purposes of this tutorial I am going to use two colours of beads to make the process of adding beads to the spiral rope as clear as possible.  If this is your first attempt at a beaded spiral rope I suggest using size 8/0 seed beads as these are a reasonable size to handle and will comfortably take multiple strands of thread.

Step 1 - the ’stop’ bead
The purpose of the ’stop’ bead is to prevent beads sliding off the end of the thread.  Here’s how its done:

Step 2 - starting the beaded spiral rope
Add three colour A beads (beads 1, 2 & 3) to your thread.  These are your ‘core’ beads.  Please see diagram below.

Step 3 - adding the first set of ‘climbing’ beads
Now add one more colour A bead (4) and three colour B ‘climbing’ beads (5,6 & 7) like so:

Step 4 - beginning the beaded spiral
Now take your thread back up beads 1, 2, 3 and 4 (so that bead 4 now joins the rest of the core beads and 5, 6 and 7 ‘climb’ along the edge) as shown in the diagram below:

You have now completed the first row of the beaded spiral rope.

Step 5 - ‘cimbing the rope’

In order to continue ‘climbing’ the beaded rope you need to add the next set of ‘climbing’ beads.  This is done just as in step 3 and the additional beads are numbered 8, 9, 10 and 11 in my diagram.  Once you have threaded them on take your needle through bead 2 and draw the thread up core beads 3, 4 and 8 (Please see my diagram as this can get a bit confusing!  The technique is really simple when explained visually!)

So following the logic of the beaded spiral rope the next row will add beads 12, 13, 14 and 15.  The thread will be taken through core beads 3, 4, 5 and 12.  For each row you take the thread through the next three core beads numerically plus the first bead of the ‘climbing’ set you have just added.

Keep going until you have your desired length of beaded spiral rope!

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