How to Open and Close Eye Pins for Jewelry Making

SKU VID-1527
Designer: Julie Bean
In this video learn how to properly open and close an eye pin without damaging it or bending it out of shape. Eye pins can be used to create beaded links and dangles. Often they will take the place of a jump ring when you are linking multiple segments together in a jewelry design. In this video also learn about the difference between an eye pin and a head pin and see how to open and close a jump ring.
Audio Transcript
Note: This audio transcript is auto-generated and may not be completely accurate.
Hi, this is Julie with beadaholique.com in different links and now why would you want to use these well they're really great to connect to create little connector links so here I just have a bead it had the eye pin on one side and I created a simple wire loop on the other side and we do have videos showing you how to do that so this little segment here can then turn into an excellent little beading component like the one you see on this pair of earrings so it had an eye pin on one side a loop on the other it creates great little beaded segment and then we were able to hang this tassel from the eye of the eye pin you can also create little links of beaded chain so this is nice because we're not using any jump rings oftentimes the little loop on the eye pin will go ahead and take the place of jump rings and you do open and close them very similar to I pin I'm sorry very similarly to jump rings but a little bit different and that's what I want to make this video so for an eye pin opening you need one pair of pliers you're gonna hold it steady twist it open link on whatever you want to link on to it and then grab that end and twist it shut and you can even pinch it a little bit if you wanted to make sure it's shut nice but there we just created a little dangle or a little connector link I do want to quickly show you how to open a jump ring because it is just a little different so instead of one pair of pliers we're gonna be using two and that's because it's really very hard to hold on to the other side of a jump ring especially when you get the smaller ones this is a five millimeter but when you start getting any smaller than that it gets to be very difficult so you have the opening up top you grab it on both sides and you twist open and you twist shut so it is the same twisting method but you are just using that one pair of pliers let me show you again twisted open twist it shut and that is how you open and close an eye pin and really quickly in case there's any confusion out there the difference between an eye pin and a head pin it's pretty obvious when you look at them side by side but the eye pin has that loop which allows you to create little connectors and the head pin just has a flat head on it and you would be able to do something like this where you're going to create basically an ending there's nothing to connect on to this but it does create a nice little dangle and you can see an example of that here this used head pins down at the bottom for the little dangles and it used opens up top for the little connector links to create the beaded chain and then it also used an eye pin right here to create that nice long segment as well so that is how you open and close an eye pin and a little bit of knowledge about the difference between eye pins and head pins and how to open and close a jump ring and if you're interested in learning other beading techniques please check out the hundreds of videos at beadaholique.com as well as on YouTube

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