To make one of the chandelier earrings you'll need some beads. And the beads we chose are
a lentil bead. This is spinel.
It's a really pretty gemstone, kind of a blue-black color.
It's drilled this way.
That's going to be our main center bead, and then we have six tiny rondelles.
And these are kind of a garnet color with a little bit of an AB finish.
Those are going to be our beads.
To go with the seven beads we have seven headpins.
We're going to use a headpin through each one of these beads.
The headpin is called a headpin because the head has a little ball on it.
That's a nice little ball headpin.
We also have this square hammered ring that's going to be a feature of the chandelier earring.
And of course an earring wire.
This is a fishhook style earring wire in gold to match our other gold elements.
For tools we're going to use round-nose pliers.
We're going to use wire cutters, and we're also going to use our chain-nose pliers.
Here's one of the chandelier earrings already made and I just wanted you to see it so you
can see what it is we're going to do.
We've got the lentil bead in the center.
We've got three rondelles on each side.
These are attached with headpins and we're going to do a wrap loop to do that.
And so let me show you how to do the first one.
The first one we're going to do is the lentil.
It goes in the center.
And I've got one of my headpins.
I'm going to feed it through the lentil.
And the lentil is shaped like a flat like a lentil bean and drilled this way--straight
through that way.
And what we're going to do with this to make a little dangle out of it is we're going to
make a wrapped loop at the top.
So I'm going to take the smallest part of my round-nose pliers.
I'm going to pinch just above the bead.
I've got the headpin pushed in there, and I'm going to bend that wire 90 degrees making
a little neck above the bead.
Then I'm going to reposition my pliers.
And I want the loop in this to be a little bit bigger.
If I do the loop here it's going to be as big as that end of the round-nose pliers.
I'm going to slide in a tiny bit more.
The loop needs to be big enough to go around this metal and still dangle.
We don't want it to be tight so I'm just going to go up a little bit on the round-nose pliers.
And then I'm going to use the pliers like a mandrel and let it shape that circle.
So I pull the wire around and I've got a partial loop there, and then I'm going to re-enter
the pliers into the hole like that and pull the wire around to make a complete loop.
So there I've got a nice round loop.
I let the pliers do that round loop making.
And before I close that off, I want to put it on to our square loop here.
I don't really know what to call this hammered square thing, but I'm going to call it a square
loop.
So I slide that up and into the opening.
You have to kind of work it through that little opening.
There it goes.
It's on there now.
And now I'm going to make my wraps.
So to make the wraps, to make this into a wrapped loop, I'm pinching across this loop,
the circle, of my headpin that I just made, then I take this tail and wrap it around the
neck, that little neck we pinched.
But this wire is a little bit harder to bend than wire we usually use because headpins
are made with different wires.
So I'm going to use my chain-nose pliers to get a good grip on it.
I'm gonna pull it around to make a loop.
And pull it around a second time to make a second wrap.
I'm sorry I said loop, I meant wrap.
Now I've got two good wraps on the neck, and then I just use the wire cutters to trim the
wire.
Ignore this little doodad that we made by doing the wrap.
I'm gonna hold that tail so it doesn't fly off.
And there's our first dangle.
If you have a little piece of that wire tail sticking out, I can see there's a little tiny
piece sticking up right there, you can use either your round-nose pliers or your chain-nose
pliers and just press it down a little bit.
But it's really not going to show.
The earring has a lot of movement while you're wearing it and no one's going to see all the
little details of how you did that wrapped loop.
But there's the first one!
So we're just going to do that again, but this time we're going to do it with one of
the tiny rondelles.
I'm just going to take the rondelle and slide it onto the ball headpin like that.
I'm gonna do the same thing we just did with the lentil.
I'm going to put the smallest part of the round-nose pliers in to make a small neck
above that bead.
Bend the wire 90 degrees.
I'm going to reposition my pliers up a little higher to make a bigger loop and bend the
wire all the way around the pliers.
I have an almost complete loop there.
I put the bottom part of the pliers in so I can finish making that loop.
So I'm gonna bring that around.
Like I said, this wire is a little bit harder, so I just have to give it a little elbow grease.
There's a nice little loop.
And now I'm gonna slide that loop onto our square hammered beautiful connector thing.
We got the this pair of hammered squares at a bead show.
We weren't sure when we got them what we were going do with them, but we just thought they
were so pretty we bought two.
Now I'm ready to do the wraps around my the neck of my head pin and because it's hard
wire, I'm gonna use the chain-nose pliers.
What I'm doing is I'm making a wrap close to these pliers and then going towards the
bead so the two wraps go in order- one close to the pliers and the next one closer to the
bead.
So I'm close to the pliers here.
Oops.
And then I'm going to bring that around and I'm closer to the bead on the second one .And
that pushes the bead up against the headpin, too.
I've got two nice little wraps there securing my wrapped loop.
And now just as we did before I'm going to trim the wire.
And hold onto that tail so does it shoot across the room.
And there's our second little garnet.
So I'm just going to keep on working the same way until I have all six of these small rondelles
put onto our hammered square.
So we've finished with all our little rondelles, and we've got all the beads are hanging, dangling
from our hammered square thing, loop, connector, whatever we want to call it.
And then I just want to make sure that I've got three on one side of the lentil and three
on the other side.
If you get to this point and one of these is over here, four and two, just flip it back
over so you've got three and three.
And we just want to make sure that they're in the right spot before we put on the earring
wire.
So to put on the earring wire, I'm going to take the fish hook earring wire here and I'm
going to use my chain nose pliers, and I want to open this loop up.
But I don't want to open it up this way.
That in a way that it will lose its round shape.
So I'm going to open it sideways, sort of slide it past, that way.
And then I'm going to put on our hammered square connector chandelier thing like that.
Fit it down into that loop.
And I'm going to close the earring wire loop the same way.
I'm going to bring it back to center.
You see.
It stayed nice and round and that's good too because it moves.
You want all these pieces to move.
That gives your chandelier earrings nice movement and sparkle.
And there they are!
Our pretty little spinel and garnet chandelier earrings.
No comments:
Post a Comment