How to Make an Austrian Crystal Necklace with Fancy Stones and Chain

SKU VID-1412
Designer: Julie Bean
In this complete how-to video, learn how to make a beautiful necklace featuring Austrian crystal chatons and fancy stones placed into their custom fit settings and then strung together with beads and beading wire. The sparkling focal is then hung from a lovely silver plated chain and attached to an Elegant Elements box clasp. Learn how to string beads as well as how to crimp a crimp bead and apply a crimp bead cover.

The brand name for the crystals shown in this video is no longer available. High quality Austrian crystals are now available under the PRESTIGE™ Crystal Components line.

Audio Transcript
Note: This audio transcript is auto-generated and may not be completely accurate.
Hi, this is Julie with beadaholique.com and see stone put into a setting and some little shut-ins and settings as well so i'm going to quickly come back to what the supplies are that we're going to be using and all of them are available for sale at beadaholique.com but first i want to show you just the variety of these fancy stones and their settings so what's great is they have these beautiful stones and they are perfectly sized and matched shape wise to fit into settings and the settings all have two holes so you have lots of options on how to use them and you put them in and then you fold over these tabs and I'm going to be showing you how to do that in just a minute but just great pear shapes wonderful rounds Rivoli's ovals a whole host of different shapes including like these cushion stones right here which is a little bit of a squared off round shape but it's just a really nice way of getting a very professional very elegant look is by combining fancy stones and their settings so let's go back to now the project that we're going to be doing today in this video is going to be a complete project so I've used a little bit of scrap beading wire that I had laying around to map out my design so that's a quick little tip is if you have some extra beading wire you can play with the design before you actually start your finished piece start working on your finished piece so this is what I've come up with I've got these little Sourav ski crystal rondelle's or a 6 millimeter and crystal paired that paradise shine Terra cast trapezoid beads and then I've got these settings here that I'm going to set these SS 39 'shit ons into and if you look close I'm going to take this big beautiful pair out of here you see where the beading wire passes underneath the stones and through the holes now each of my settings do have two holes but I'm using just to use their top holes so you can use one or two I'm going to be using a pelican elements class as this little box class nice little way that it slides together for a very secure fit some chain this is silver-plated chain and I have two feet right here some crimp beads so these are actually crimp tubes I've got the crimp bead cover so that they end up looking just like a little bead and I've got some jump rings I'm going to be using soft touch by soft flex beading wire and a medium weight and that's it for my supplies now for my actual tools I'm going to be using some bead Stoppers a popsicle stick to set my stones a couple pairs of chain nose pliers a crimping plier and a cutter so let's begin the first thing I want to do is divide this off and set my stones so I'm going to take all of these front and center because I need to set them all it doesn't take very long and it's actually quite easy to do and you don't need any special like metalworking tools a just standard popsicle stick that you can pick up you know a lot of different places are saved from your popsicle over from your ice cream bar will work just fine so we are going to take the setting and you see these upright Prague's put a chaton into it and you just want to make sure that it's sitting nicely in it and not off center so this one went in a little crooked I'm just gonna drop it in there we go and now we're just going to take the end of our popsicle stick and press that tab over the crystal and it bends quite nicely we're just gonna work our way around we're just bending that tip over tip at the prom and now what I'd like to do is once I've got all of them in there time to go back and just take my popsicle stick and kind of roll it over a little bit it's not gonna hurt the crystal that's why we're using a wood stick and first is something that was metal that might scratch I just want to make sure those prongs are really set for two reasons one I want to make sure that my crystal doesn't fall out and two I don't want this to snag on my clothing so there we go we've got one set we're gonna do all of them for this project so for this particular strong necklace we're going to be using six of them of the little SS 39 size now if you have any difficulty with your stone slipping at all a good way to counter that is to set the prong on opposite sides at the same time so you set this one here and then instead of going to the next one over go to the one across but I really don't finally slip very much I'm just pressing that down that might be a better tip if you are using a bigger stone perhaps for these small little ones stave stay put pretty well I've got my last little want to set and I wanted to show you one more quick tip for setting these if your hands are a little bit shaky a nice way or if you just prefer this method another way of setting these guys is to set it down on a flat solid surface and then push the tab over once it's sitting down so there you go just like that you're just pressing that tab over and you're rotating it on your work surface my apologies if my hands are obscuring this at all that's why I prefer the other method on camera but this is a perfectly valid option especially if maybe your hands are a little bit shaky and you want the table to work as a stabilizer for you so they are all set now for the big pearl we're gonna do the I'm sorry not the big pearl the big pair now for the big pair this is a little bit easier actually because you have more surface area to hold on to fold over those tabs and this might be one that you do want to work opposites so see how that's setting it and the tabs are nice and discreet so you're still seeing all that wonderful sparkle but it is secure in there which is really nice so we have got all our stone set and we're ready to begin our stringing so I'm gonna cut a length of beading wire and because I laid out my little test piece I know that I actually don't need that much beading wire so maybe Oh 12 inches 13 inches something like that is gonna be more than enough the main length of my necklace is gonna come from the chain and so you have two options at this point you can go ahead and cut your chain right now to the links that you want and just attach the beading wire right on to it or you can start with a bead stopper so I'm going to start with a bead stopper if you're not used to how these work because they're really great they literally stop your beads from falling off you squeeze them you pinch them together it becomes like an accordion fan and you just set your wire down in there and now we're gonna string on a crimp bead in this case again I'm using crimp tubes then we're gonna do a rondell a trapezoid bead with the point facing outward another rondell another trapezoid another rondell and now we're ready for our first stone in its setting and I'm going to go through the top hole right here and come out the other side you want to make sure it comes out the top hole on the other side and if you look on the back you can see it just a little bit behind that point and it's just nice and under our stone so now between these stones I'm gonna put another crystal and again I'm going through the top hole and top hole when the stone is facing me slide it down another rondell another stone is setting and now another rondelle our big beautiful showstopper centerpiece and again just going through that top hole you see it go through the back so we've got half of our strong work done we're just gonna make it a mirror image on the other side we have finished our pretty focal piece right here and I'm just gonna put a bead stopper on the other side so now I can pick this up it's not gonna go anywhere which is great and we've got all of our beads strung so now I want to measure this so this part here measure is about five and a half inches so you get to choose now how long you want your necklace to be your clasp is gonna add just about a half an inch a little bit more than that so you consider this piece as maybe six inches six and a half inches so I want to make this into an 18 inch necklace so I am going if this is six inches with my clasp I need another 12 inches so I actually have two feet of chain here but it is going to be fine with just one foot so here's the one foot so six inches right here I'm gonna cut and then I can either measure another six inches or I could have just had used this as my measuring tool as well made an equal length if you wanted to make this necklace longer just add extra length of chain now we're gonna attach it to our chain to do that we're gonna remove a bead stopper from one end and this is nice because these are nice closed links they're fully soldered we're just gonna attach it directly to the end chain link and come back down and around and through that crimp bead and the bead next to it pull so you've got like a nice little loop keep pulling keep pulling you want it to be able to move you don't want it too tight especially with this chain so I'm gonna leave the loop just like that now we're gonna crimp it we have a pair of crimping pliers it has two notches might be able to see against my hand one notch is shaped like a kidney bean that's back towards the handles and the other is oval-shaped we're going to start with the back notch which is kidney bean-shaped we're gonna squeeze and what that does is it helps to flatten our crimp bead and make it that same kidney shape and now we're gonna go ahead and stand that up right in the front notch and squeeze and that folds it over onto itself so that is a really nice secured kind of bead what I want to do is I want to cover that crimp bead and make it look just like a regular bead so I am going to use a bead cover so this in essence is an open bead it's got a nice opening and it's a good round shape and we want that opening to face out away from our plier handles I'm gonna come in here I'm gonna slip it over our crimp bead and squeeze and now it just looks like a bead go to the other side okay and I will trim this little tail here at the end so here we've got this make sure it looks right if you're happy with it do the same thing on this side over here so we went through that end chain link I'm gonna go back down and around ah beutel's getting away from me go back down through it and the next bead and now we're gonna pull it but we don't want any gaps so this is a pretty big gap right here we want to cinch that up you can do that by just pulling your bead down and I don't want this too tight if this is too tight it's not gonna drape and it's gonna be too stiff so you can even curve it a little bit to mimic what is gonna do on your neck so that you make sure that it's not too tight so that's about right for me I have a little teeny gap right here which I am totally okay with and I want to cinch up that hole just over that loop just a little bit there we go okay I like that it's not gonna be stiff now also your couldn't bead cover adds just a fraction of a millimeter to the width right here and so it does behoove you to have a little bit of slack so I'm gonna do the same thing to crimp this crimp bead stand it upright and now we're gonna go in with another crimp bead cover slip it over it and squeeze now we are ready to trim our tails I'm just gonna go where they're exiting all we have left to do is attach our clasp we're gonna do that with jump rings so to open and close a jump ring you're going to want two pairs of chain nose pliers and these are open jump rings they have a little slit at the top so you grab a on either side and you twist we can link that on to our chain and then we can link that on to our clasp and close it on up now we're going to do the same thing on the other side and then we will be done with our necklace and I'm using a four millimeter jump ring here okay so you wanna make sure it's nice and tight and there we go our necklace is complete and so we've done some stringing we've done some stone setting and we've opened and closed some jump rings and we've used a really pretty silver plated chain as well I'm gonna put this on a bust real quick so you can see what would look like against black just because this is silver straighten up our chain link right there so there we go so we've got that pretty swarovski crystal the tier Casspi is a silver plated chain and that pretty little button looking clasp in the back so I hope you enjoyed this video you can find all the supplies that you've seen here as well as the tools at beadaholique.com as well as hundreds of other beading videos showing you all different types of techniques thanks so much for watching you

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C
Canadian Fan
Beautiful!

Great to see how you can create a beautiful piece of jewelry with these stones and settings.