FEATURED IN THIS VIDEO
Audio Transcript
Note: This audio transcript is auto-generated and may not be completely accurate.
good morning everyone happy 2018 oh my gosh already thank you so much for joining us here in the beadaholique studios I'm Julie beam and mrs. cat Sylvia hi everyone if you haven't joined us before it every month we do one of these classes where we try to teach you something new about jewelry making or review tools which is the topic of this course down here we're going to talk all about the great tools and designer must-have tools for your jewelry making a wide variety of different techniques and types of jewelry making projects so thank you so much for joining us we hope your new year has been off to a great start we would love to hear how you're doing if you have not joined us before you might not know that we do a giveaway each and every one of these classes all right so first off is this macrame board and this is great for your braiding and knotting projects it has a wonderful grid and a ruler on the top and these little notches to anchor your threads we have a thread zap and we have this great tool kit and these wonderful bead Stoppers so we're gonna show you how to use a thread zap and how to use the bead Stoppers and the macrame board and and during this class and we're also going to open up this tool kit now to win all you need to do is leave a comment in the comment section and it could be any comment it can be a question that you have about what we're talking about we would love to hear your questions this is really your opportunity to interact with us and ask us questions we'll answer them live here you could tell us what your New Year's resolution would be we'd love to hear that which you're gonna be working on 2018 if you have some beading projects in mind it can even just be a Hello I'm tuning in from New York or Sweden or wherever it is we'd love to hear that we have so much fun reading those comments so let's go ahead and start our class let's start yapping about tools so there are so many different tools out there and each of the tools that you see here are available at beadaholique.com and there's more information on each of them in the product listings but we are going to start with some great tools that I really think are essential so I know we're kind of panning over the table you see we've got ones for stringing we've got ones for metalwork for memory wire bracelet so we've got looms but I'm gonna start right over here and I'm going to be making an earrings I don't want to just show you what these tools can look like I really want to show you how we use them so this is the earring I'm gonna be making here and I actually was able to make I was actually able to make this earring hook and I had not used this tool before prepping for this class actually was a tool that cat had had some fun experimenting with and now I love it I definitely want to get one of these and make my own earring hooks because it was so easy so what we're going to be doing is using this wire jig by artistic wire and for it we're going to be using 20 gauge artistic wire in gold so we're going to make the earring finding first and I am going to start out by pulling off some wire and I want about four or five inches and you notice it's a little bit kinky so here is a great tool to straighten out your wire it's a nylon jaw pliers and you see we've used this a lot but the nylon jaws are still in really great shape so what we're gonna do is I'm gonna hold onto the spool now this is a little tip when you are straightening wire if possible keep it on the spool as long as you can because this gives you something to grip on Jim and just grab that wire between those nylon jaws and pull and that really helps to straighten out the wire you could go from a couple different angles to and we do actually have the replacements for the nylon jaw pliers as well so if you do a lot of wire work and you end up wearing them out we should we have actually a great video showing you how to replace the little tips you can keep using your pliers year after year and just replace those you see there's little screws right there and we have a video showing you how to do it next I'm gonna use my favorite cutter so this is a beadsmith cutter I love it I just it's got a nice fine tip to it and I'm gonna cut about five inches off using that cutter and I'm actually going to now hand this wire over to Kat because she's gonna be using it in her next project and here is this wire J I'm gonna have it face me so that I can see what I'm doing a little bit better but then I'll turn it around so you can see it so we're gonna put our wire through the hole and we're gonna do about 3/4 of an inch or so just enough to anchor it that's our anchor now we're gonna go around this little triangle on the inside of that first little dowel up and around that nice big circle shape on the inside of that other dowel and we're gonna bring our wire all the way around and make a loop and now this also comes with this little tool and this is a pusher tool so if you set it down on your table this goes right over those metal dowels and you can push your wire down and that really helps for it to lay straight now it's time to go ahead and pull this off the jig so I'm gonna go ahead pull that back up and I'm gonna just cut it I know I'm not going to need that little piece and I'm gonna carefully just pull it off of my wire jig we can cut it right here too so it came right off perfect okay so where my wire crisscross is I want to go ahead and cut I'm gonna take my cutter cut it so I've got a nice loop and now I can decide how long I want this piece to be so that's gonna be the part that goes into your ear you can make it really long or you can make it short come in and make it a little bit on the shorter side and just cut it and now I'm gonna take my very favorite chain nose plier these fine points of them and they're really quite lightweight which is nice as well and their grips are very comfortable like a nice rubber grip so I'm gonna straighten out my little loop with my pliers real quick and now I want to flatten this I want to work harden it a little bit so I'm going to be using a wire whacker tool now this is great you can use it with a hammer or without and normally you would use it on your table but because we have so much set up here I'm not on my table so what you would normally do you've got these two plates you would set it down on your table like so and you would whack it like you're you can even go ahead and put the plates down and take like a rubber mallet and hammer it on top of it I'm gonna do it in the air because I don't want to disturb my table here but you see how this is just sitting upright a little bit it's not quite flat here we go sorry for the how loud this is going to be so I'm really really just whacking it like it says it's a wire whacker tool and that's gonna help to fit as well as work hard in it sorry guys we do have to apologize for the occasional little cough yes I'm so sorry guys I was oh it ended up being a little sick over the holidays which was not fun but I'm back in here alright so now we're gonna use another cool tool this is a wire around our tool so we're gonna go ahead and smooth out that cut edge on our wire because we want it to feel good when it goes through our ear we don't want any little burrs or bits of metal so we're just going to take this little cup and put it over the tip of the wire and rotate it and you can even move it around a little bit so we're just getting rid of any little sharp bits of metal so that when this goes through your ear it's nice and smooth and that's really gonna go ahead and make this a nice complete finding so it's really fun to make your own findings can be a little intimidating to start but once you've done a couple you're just gonna love making them so there we have a matching earring hook and with this wire jig tool it's really nice because they're always going to be uniform now I'm going to show you how to use another one of my favorite tools and that is a wire looping plier so if you've seen some of our videos we have almost 1,500 videos and you'll see that I use these three tools a lot I love them this is probably my absolute favorite must-have designer tool and it is a wire looping plier and what it does for you I mean it takes the Swarovski faux pearl and I put it on my ball head pin and I'm going to grip it right above where the wire exits the bead and squeeze and it just made half my loop for me go ahead pull that wire down rotate my pliers up to the top and so I am able to know I can keep it in this pair of pliers or I can switch to a chain nose let's see that just made a lovely loop and now I'm just gonna twist it around and trim it off and tuck in my tail and now what we can do because we did work hard in this and it is a really nice finished earring hook we're just gonna open that loop slide on our wrapped wire loop and we have a finished earring so these are some great tools and you can use them for a variety of projects but these are some wonderful essential must-have tools and a couple of the skills we just learned right there you can apply to a lot of different jewelry making projects so that was my first project showcasing my first tools and now Kat is gonna show us some more tools for making your own wire components as well yes I'm Julie may I actually borrow yours Iran flush cutters ma thank you alright so I made this pair of earrings I did this fully in the video but I just want to show you the tools that I use to do this now these are really great these are from the beadsmith and these are looping pliers now this one has a square looping and this one is a round looper so if you could just kind of look at the noses on those you'll sort of see the different sizes and just looking really up-close it's easier to see here on the square one but they have lovely little guides here so you have two millimeter three four and then on this nose five six seven and eight so this allows you to get a really nice consistent loop because the thing that I have trouble with when I am wire working is getting that nice consistency so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to kind of show you how to use the square pliers here just really quickly I'm not going to do a full project like Julie but just kind of a full little demonstration here so what I want to do is I'm gonna make a four millimeter square loop here so what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna kind of set my wire in there just like so and across the tip you'll notice you just need to set it just a little bit across just like so alright so I have it there so I'm just going to bend it around and then I have my nice little kink and it's a nice little sharp kink there so I'm just going to rotate and again just line it up with my guide of my four millimeters and press down again so now you can see and then rotate it one more time and press down one more time there we go and now what I'm gonna do is you can see that I have my nice little square so I'm gonna set it in there one more time and now what I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to press that up just a little bit so I have made a little decorative head pin there so this can actually be really fun and you can see I use something similar here to create this and then just add it a little loop but I just want to say that these are really wonderful tools to get a nice consistency because especially when you're making earrings you can just see how nice and consistent those loops are and if you tried to do that and with any other tool you're gonna have a little bit of trouble and that's also another great thing that you can do these are again by the beadsmith and these are just those little step-down pliers so you're getting a nice little mandrel kind of style here but you're getting a nice consistent loop so that's just a nice little thing for some of our wire looping pliers and if you're doing a lot of wire work I definitely recommend them I can't wait to play with these a little bit more and make some fun clasps and components so I'm excited to play around with them a little bit more it's a really versatile tool yeah you can really absolutely so you got chilly I have some metalworking tools great bracelet and then stretch bracelet using a variety of tools so let's go take the metal cuff first so I have these wonderful blanks and these are just flat I'm gonna come in a variety of the width and this is an easy bender tool and it's really specifically made to bend this metal so we're gonna make the cuff so what you do is you take this blank an you see it has these nice smooth edges and again you can find this at beadaholique.com and Rachel who's helping us with questions she can provide you the link for that so go ahead and bend it and we're gonna bend it not all the way I'm not bending it fully away and then we're gonna go to the other side and bend it as well and again we're not going to bend it fully I'm just gonna bend it almost almost all the way but we don't want to do this we don't want to create a divot or a kink in the middle so there's what we've got so far now what we're gonna do is we're gonna take our bracelet bending plier and you see it's got these nylon jaws so it won't disturb the metal and it's got that nice Bend to it as well now we're just gonna work our way around it you see how it's really forming very nicely we're just going around and around just giving that a little extra a nice curve to it and you see how perfect that is it's a really nice smooth shape and the nylon jaws are great because they're really not disturbing that metal or marking it or bending it so there we have a cuff bracelet you can do it with any width of it comes in a variety of widths and a variety of metals so that is the nylon jaw bracelet bending pliers and the ez bender tool now really a quite opposite style of bracelet is a stretch bracelet I have a couple examples here now we got in a tool a couple months ago and it was really one of those like wait this is so cool why wasn't this around before yeah and that is this stretch cord needle and so this is about ten point seven five inches and it's meant to be used with beads that have a hole that is one millimeter or larger if you have beads that are smaller than that I would recommend a big eye needle I want to show you what that looks like real quick so a big eye needle is great because it's slender but it has if we see that has a really nice big eye and so for this project we are going to be using some opal on which is a nice stretch cord I have cut a length that's about 15 16 inches and I placed a bead stopper on the end bead Stoppers are great for stringing projects as well as stretch projects and they're basically this nice little coil and we are giving this away in the giveaway so please do leave those comments to enter the giveaway but you just push these two little tabs together and put it on the end so I've pre-cut my stretch fiber and if I was using smaller hole beads I would just put this nice big eye needle right through that this stretch fiber through the big eye needle and then I'd be able to string my beads but I'm going to show you this needle here so I'm going to recreate this bracelet these are wonderful vintage beads right here and I'm just going to put them on to my needle and you see that it's got that nice stopper down at the bottom and what's nice is you can go ahead and play with your pattern and just take your beads on and off the needle without having to take them on and off the stretch cord so you're not going anywhere you can make it as long or short as you want and once you've got all the beads that you want what you're going to do is you're going to take your stretch cord now and put it on the black here so you can see a little bit better just hook it at the end of that needle and then there they go and they're on the stretch cord I love it too it's been really fun to play with where has this been all my stretch cord life I know exactly so then what you would do to finish your bracelet is you would just take your two ends and knot them together like so and I would do a nice secure knot right there and then for an added measure of security I would apply a little bit of the GS hypo cement for time restraints I'm not going to do that here on camera but you would just put a dab of it if you look at this it has a really nice fine needle point and so then you would just go ahead and apply that to your knot let it dry and then your ends and that is how you make a stretch bracelet using that really cool tool I love it and I also do I want to make sure that these get enough attention to because we use these big eye needles all the time especially kumihimo braiding we use these a lot because we're using like an S LAN cord which is a little too thick to go through a traditional needle so we use these big eye ones all the time and we love them so I think Kat now is going to show us a little bit more of her favorite tools yeah so I I'm gonna kind of continue our little bracelet but I'm gonna kind of move on to bead weaving a little bit so if you have done any type of peyote you've probably had a little trouble trying to get your cords to clip off so some people do use flush cutters I personally don't recommend that what I recommend is using a thread zapper now we have a couple of different types of thread zappers we have this one which is a nice compact one from the beadsmith and then we have the thread zap - also from the beadsmith but this has a little bit more of that exposed thing I'm sorry it exposed that burr I guess I'll call it this one is nice you take off the guard and you just press up so you get that nice little thing and by pressing it up that tip is heating up right now so what you want to do is just kind of leave it open for a moment and then I'm gonna take it down to my beadwork here and I want to get it nice and close and what's gonna happen is it's just gonna zap off that thread so now you can't even tell where that thread used to be so the nice thing is is you can kind of see I'll try to hold it up against my hand here I don't know if that'll help but what happens is it actually sort of Sears the end so you get that nice little sort of it almost beads up as though it's wax so you'll get a nice little seared end and that will also help it stay nice and knotted in your work so you don't have to worry about it slipping through now I did of course finna do a finishing technique where I added some knots here but this is a great little thing and it's also nice if you have the kiddos around to keep the nice guard there so that it won't stay out and be hot so I recommend this one this is a great to use and it just takes a couple of triple-a batteries so nice and compact to bring with you alright so that is one of the little tools that I like to use while bead weaving I think before you go on to the next one we don't have a quick questionable okay a couple questions not stretch bracelets okay so we had a couple questions which is your preferred stretch cord to use so we really like opal on I have it right here this is a really nice stretch fiber it's very silky it's very smooth and it does not stretch out it I think with a stretch bracelet is important to keep in mind over time if you do keep wearing it time and time and time again eventually it's going to stretch out it is it's just the nature of the type of project that it is but this is a really nice quality stretch cord we really like using it and then the other question was how do you keep it from coming undone so my best recommendation is to use that GS hypo cement on your knots so make sure you tie a double knot you know a triple knot yeah and then even some anchoring knots within the bracelet you can leave your tails a little bit long feed them back through maybe use a big eye needle feed them back through your beads and then at another point tie another knot and add a little bit more glue yeah I definitely like to if the space allows feed it back through that way it's just a little extra security and another tip is your beads are important too if you use really heavy beads that can become a problem it can really cause your bracelet to come apart it just because of the sheer weight of the beads and the pressure it's putting on those knots in the stretch cord also be careful of sharp beads something like a gemstone bead is really not ideal for a stretch cord they tend to have sharper edges and that can cut the stretch fiber so maybe use a stringing material such as a beading wire instead and I think we have another question how long does it take per hypo cement to dry oh really good question yeah I think it's pretty quick I don't think I've ever timed it I would say let it dry an hour limit pardon me one thing that I like to do is in the example that Julie did here what you can actually do is add the GS hypo cement to the knot and then kind of slide the bead over the knot so that it kind of glues that underneath the bead so that you're not gluing like two beads together you're kind of sliding it over that way it also adds that little security and it's now glued to that particular bead yeah so that's one thing that you can do that I know I like to do that it helps secure my knots a little bit but yeah I would say Gia's hypo cement does dry fairly quickly however I would try to give it 24 hours before good right I start taking it on and off and just and really wearing it out so let it set be patient yeah let it set but then you should be good I'd say solidly after 24 hours yeah that's a very good recommendation so yeah but I like using Gia's hypo cement so is so I pull my so like if I've got this here if you see this example here if I was to put the Jesus hypo cement on that knot which I would do I would then go and tug this a little more yeah trying to get it into the knot so instead of just laying it on top and trimming your tails I would definitely tug it a little bit more so it can really kind of seep into the inner workings of the knot yeah kind of get in the in the fibers of the cord mm-hmm exactly so all right so I'm going to continue here I have a couple of looms and this is gonna give me a little opportunity here to talk about the two different types of jewel limbs that we have so we have the baby jewel in which I have here and the regular jewel loom now I've set up a piece of work on my little baby loom here and the nice thing about this is that it does come completely set up so it will be nice and curved for you with the regular jewel loom you'll actually have to do a little bit of setup but what's nice is that it does come and comes flat so that's why I don't want to set anything up here so ours has been bent into place so we love the tools like it is that pretty set up for us here but you can use this metal rod that comes with it and it will sort of set up and sort of bow your jewel loom for you it's actually a very nice easy setup and then your tooling is all set to go so the baby jewel loom is nice in addition to the jewel room because it is literally half the size so you can just kind of see that I've lined up my ends and we're about half the size here what's nice is that you can create smaller pieces without using as much thread and the cool thing about the baby loom is that you can actually loom with wire so if you've ever tried to do that you definitely don't want to use the full loom because you're gonna lose a lot of that wire going back and forth so what's nice is you can actually use it on the baby loom and create really great little wire Fogle's so it's gonna give me an opportunity to talk about our new kits and these are our January kits and these are our looms statement earrings and these were made using the baby Joule loom so just some really fun things so I know people always think of loom as bracelets or sometimes even necklaces but you can actually make a really great statement earring so these are the four varieties that we have for our kits this month and these are featuring a really gorgeous swarovski crystal here at the bottom and we do sell these in refill kits as well so be sure to check that out that is available at beadaholique.com and that should be on our homepage today so be sure to check that out and cat designed all of these and they are so gorgeous that's so much fun we have me weaving patterns I really really do so I want to kind of give them all their own little personality and another thing that's great is if you buy one full kit and you buy the others as refills the same beads you'll get the same number of beads so let's say you wanted to make this pattern but with the pink white and gray you can do that because you'll get the same the right amount of beads to make any I'll just walk the color palette swap them out Oh sounds fun I know kind of a neat little fun thing that I wanted to do cuz I know our refill kits are very popular so I know that you guys love those so I wanted to kind of make it a little extra extra special this time yeah and then it's nice because with the kits you do get the pattern yes what and get the full color pattern which which is really nice and it's easy to follow so yeah so we love these he did such a good job thank you I think we have another question before we go on okay you changed the tip it's it's very simple I'm gonna do this without touching it because it's probably still a little warm so there is a way to what you're gonna do is you're going to want to take out the batteries so that you don't warm this up but you simply remove it and then you just put the other one in we have a video showing you how to exactly how to do that we do sell the replacement tips as well you can also let me just put my brace back on here on the threads app - you can actually see this a little bit easier so that black piece at the top there that just pulls right out and that whole tip is the replacement tip now when to replace it is kind of up to you you'll start to notice when it doesn't start to work and if the batteries if the switching the batteries doesn't help it's probably time to replace the tip also I know that some people will use this with some different cords so what can happen is a little bit of that cord will actually end up melted onto your tip if that does happen what you can try to do is warm up your tip and try to get that off very carefully I would use some pliers but go ahead and replace the tip I use these a lot but honestly I don't think I've replaced the tips on these guys and maybe a year or two yeah it doesn't happen very often that's a long time yeah but we do sell the replacement absolutely we can continue to use the tool so alright so I going back to loom real quick one of the things I want to talk to you about and you can actually kind of see it so this is the cord that I use and it was sort of the interior corner of my last little spool of Nemo so it's really if nice and king - which is a little frustrating to work with because it can kind of knot up a little bit but I'm gonna show you a little trick here and this is actually using beeswax so what this thing is is this is just a little bit of beeswax there and then you just take your naima cord lay it across and then just kind of pull it through and what's going to happen is it's just gonna coat that little nemo and a little bit of that beeswax and then you can just kind of run your fingers along it but what's gonna happen is it'll kind of pull it out for you so it'll be a little bit straighter you can actually already see on the ends there where it's getting a nice and straight for me so straighter i'll say yes you just pull it through your nice little beeswax there and it gives you a nice little coating and also helps to sort of just secure and make it a little bit a little bit stronger kind of conditions the thread as you work so we have a nice little beeswax and what's great is your hands don't get dirty because it comes with this nice little compact a little thing here and you can actually click this open there we go so you can actually kind of see the beeswax and you can rotate it as it starts to kind of you can see I have a few notches here that I've used over over time here but you can just kind of rotate it and then you have fresh beeswax at the top so just something fun and just some great little Loom tricks here for you I think this is a great time if you could hand me the giveaway donor talk a little bit more about the giveaway so if you are watching this live thank you again for joining us we do like to give a something away with all of our different wants a month live classes and so today we're giving away this tool kit and I want to open it up here so you can see what's actually inside and the way you enter the giveaway is by leaving a comment it could be a question it could be a Hello it can be anything so this is a great tool kit because one thing that I like about is it has a crimping plier a lot of toolkits don't so this has a crimping plier which is perfect cuz I'm going to show you how to use crimping pliers here next but it also has a nice sharp cutter a nylon jaw pliers of tweezers a bead scoop a chain nose plier another pair of cutters and around those pliers so with this you can do stringing projects you can do wire projects a whole bunch of different things you can do so a really nice solid tool kit so it has one thing we are giving away you're also giving away the thread zap - which you just heard Kat talk about the bead Stoppers which you've seen me work with and then the large macrame board and cats going to show you in a little bit how to use the smaller version but this is a really great fun tool as well so we just want to share some of our favorite tools with you for joining us and we do have another question before we move on hi Carol do you have to wax your thread as Carol's question and the answer is no you don't have to it's purely optional I like to do it especially with loom and and I do that because I know I'm gonna be doing multiple passes and usually my thread is quite long and it does help your thread from tangling and nodding on its own because it's just a little bit more slippery so it doesn't King as much it also straightens out your thread but it is purely optional you do not have to do it is a preference thing I personally like to do it but you don't have to all right so I'm gonna go with you oh thank you by the way thank you careful question and please keep sending them through I'm gonna go into some stringing techniques showing you some crimping pliers so I have three different crimping pliers and actually I would love to grab the crimper out of that tool kit that we're gonna be giving away real quick there you go all right so stringing is so much fun there's so many different things you can do with it I have a couple examples right here just some strung projects so here is really a traditional strung necklace it comes to a end here where we have a single loop on our clasp then here I have a bracelet I actually made this in our last Facebook and YouTube live class which was about fancy stones by Swarovski and this actually did a technique where it took the beading wire and it looped it around and then you actually ended up with all the strands that you needed to feed through the crimp bead which was kind of fun and then here is another strong bracelet and this is using two strands of beading wire coming to an end here on the two loops and you'll notice here I have crimp bead covers covering microbeads so let's talk a little bit about crimp beads and stringing because there's a bunch of different tools and you might be most familiar with the one that comes in the tool kit so this one here is a really a pretty traditional standard crimping plier it has the two notches one that's very much like a crescent shape and one that's an oval shape and you would crimp the crimp bead to begin with in that back notch and then you would fold it over on itself in that front notch and so this is a great standard tool but there's a couple other tools for crimping that you might not be aware of that we really love so I have this Iran foreign one crimping pliers so if this allows you to crimp three different sizes of crimp tubes a one millimeter a two millimeter end a three millimeter and I'm going to show you real quick how to do that and you might notice something special on my spool here I have a beetle on a spool tamer put on it and what this allows you to do and it's just a wonderful elastic cord and I thread the end thread at the end of my wire through it look I'm just pulling my wire without having to take off that plastic guard and it's keeping my wire from coming undone or becoming knotted so that's a fun tool too I am going to borrow my cutters so here I've got a length of beading wire and I'm not going to actually make a complete project so I'm not going to worry about the length too much I am going to put a bead stopper on the end to prevent my beads from coming undone and I'm just gonna go ahead and pretend that I'm just stringing some pretty beads and bead caps as if I was a slit all right so there's stopped there at the end and then let's say I want to go ahead and I want to attach one half of my toggle clasp so I would take a crimp bead and put it on it and this is a two by two crimp bead and then I'd thread it through the loop on my clasp and then I would go back down through that crimp bead and I always like to go through another adjacent bead if possible all right so it's made a nice loop and now I'm ready to crimp it now with this Iran foreign one regardless of what size crimp bead you're going to crimp all of them in this back notch that has really like a triangle shape to it so I'm going to place it in that triangle shape and crimp and it then mimicked that shape for me now because this is a two by two crimp tube I'm going to go ahead and place it in the middle notch of my plier right there and squishes was secured down so I just made my crimp bead and the foreign one is that it also is a chain nose plier so that's a cool tool because you not only get your crimping pliers but you get your chain nose pliers all right so now I want to show you another tool that does the same thing but it's just a different type of tool this is a double notch crimping plier maybe it looks a little bit better about with the gray no that's not here we go this was the one from the tool kit and this is the double notch so you'll notice it has an extra notch so this can crimp a two millimeter or a three millimeter crimp tube so I'm just going to cut off my crimp tube but real quick I should show you how nice that looks with that sir on four and one you see that fold over very nice and neat and you can easily cover it with a crimp bead baby couldn't bead cover I should say yep I'm just going to cut that off so I can show this again all right let's go ahead and put another crimp bead on there and we're going to do the same thing using the double notch so I think if you like to use a wide variety of beading wire thicknesses it might be a good reason to pick up a crimping plier that does more than one size well especially because you don't know until you try to if you've bought something and are trying to test it you know cuz it just it just also depends on how many strands are trying to get through there as well we're trying to do a multi strand thing yeah like this bracelet here I was definitely trying to do a multi strand yeah through that single crimp bead so I had to use a bigger crimp tube alright so this one here this is going to be for two millimeter and three millimeter so we're just putting this one in that middle notch and we do have a question here so the question is that real quick okay there we go and that is done with that double notch crimping plier wonderful so we do have a question to you the question is about how do you finish the snowflake forms and what tool would you use and someone suggested a memory wire plier you can I would suggest using a really good round nose plier I would suggest the brand blubbers they have a really nice strong plier to kind of give you that little loop at the end if that's what you're going for but yeah I don't I do you know what cuts those snowflake forms oh that's an excellent question um that's a really thick wire cuz it's meant to be I don't think I've ever cut it because it's usually pre-cut if I'm remembering right is it's kind of pre shaped like a snowflake and you put things on the end so what I've always trician aliy done is I've left it intact as is put all my beads on it and then I've used a round nose plier like you suggest like a rubber you just turn over the ends which actually imma show you exactly how to do that here in my next project well and I was just gonna say you could also use these I think as well if you're trying to get consistent leaves let's say you wanted to dangle something from the ends and you wanted a three millimeter loop or a two millimeter loop these are really good strong pliers you can kind of see how hefty these are yeah I'm here to something that might be a little bit more dainty so something like this would be good I would definitely recommend going for something kind of heavy-duty though cuz that wire is is strong that is a lot something that's got a nice good grip to it and so something like this I think yeah that would work as well for sure yeah all right so let's continue with your bracelet here okay I have one last crimping plier to show you and this has become a new favorite of mine and it's become a new favorite of mine thanks to Sarah Euler alright so this is the magical part and you see it looks quite different from the other crimpers it just has that one round little hole so if we look I made up a few samples here so this is what a traditional crimping plier crimped bead looks like you've got that little seam right there where you folded it over with the magical crimper it ends up just looking like a little bead there's no seam it's just like a really nicely formed round little bead so what's important to remember about the magical crimpers is it's actually really quite specific in the materials you want to use to get the best results you're going to want to use sterling silver or gold filled crimp tubes that are two by two you're also going to want to use more of a medium weight beading wire such as a point zero one eight point zero one nine something like that and this here is a nice medium weight one and you see it's that point zero one nine so we're going to go ahead and put a sterling silver two by two crimp tube on here and we're going to do the same beginning process where we just put on the loop on our clasp fold it over go back down through the crimp tube and down through another bead and pull it up so that we have that nice little loop now here is where things get a little bit off from what you normally do if you normally use a traditional crimper because you're not going to be doing a two-step method this is a single step method so what you're going to do is you're going to place that if you look at it so I got a little almost like a round divot you're going to place that crimp tube in it and what you're going to do is you're going to really carefully look to make sure it is fully in that little round notch that is not sticking up out of it at all so that's really a key part to this and you're going to squeeze and you're not going to worry about squeezing too hard I know with a Tercel crimping plier you usually want to squeeze pretty hard so we just squeeze gently and now we're going to rotate it make sure it's still in that little little notch and squeeze and you see what's starting to happen is just starting to take shape and again squeeze I'm starting to look more like that little bead so see us coming to be a nice little round shape and it really is just patience and I think the key is to make sure you're using the right materials that's sterling silver gold filled and that you are making sure it's really within the plier and in that little round not because that's what's molding it you don't want it sticking up otherwise I'll end up with like a little flared edge but that is how you use these magical Preppers and thanks again to Sarah Euler because she reintroduced me to these and I love them we do have another question hi Janet okay great so Janet is asking can we share tips on knowing which size crimp bead or crimp tube to use for your project so I think the best advice I can give you is to check the product descriptions yes so on our website we've been we've really tried to research every single product which includes all of the crimp beads the crimp tubes and it will tell you what size wire is recommended to use with them and then a lot of other tips such as the plier and in the pliers we list which pliers to use with the crimp tubes so we've really tried to make everything as easy as possible but it's really a matter of those product descriptions so I think that's the best tip I can give is to double check all that make sure that your wire matches your crimp tube if you're using a heavier beading wire you're going to want at least a 2 by 2 a 2 by 2 is pretty standard if you're using a really thin beading wire you can go with a one by one so I think that's the biggest tip is making sure your beading wire matches your crimp bead or crimp tube even more so than your beads well and one thing I like to do is actually exactly what Julie has done is before I even start a project I have a crimp tube that I'm willing to sacrifice so that I can make a little loop and just double check it before you do all the work of stringing especially if you're doing some big multi strand piece or something before you do any of that take one of your crimp tubes and just double check it you know cuz I know sometimes for me my crimp tubes they all end up in a bag together so I have to kind of separate them out so I want to make sure that okay so this size is the right size that I want in case you've forgotten which it is or which skew it is or product or whatever so that's a great little thing it's just just double check before you even begin your project but yeah we do a great job of trying to help you guys out and figure out exactly which is the right size and if you're curious a great way to look is by looking at some of our strong projects and you can see the beading wire that we use and the size crimp tube so that can also kind of help you as a guide as well if you let's say wanted to make one of the bracelets like Julie had made here and let's say you already have crimp tubes at home what I would recommend is looking at the size that we provide and see if yours matches and you got a match so that's that's a great tip is you can look at a similar project even yeah even if you aren't making the exact project look at something very similar and be like oh you're doing Swarovski pearls they did Swarovski pearls this is what they use and that's a great tip to kind of give you a guide just a little little guideline as you as you work yeah alright so I think I'm done with my stringing one thing I do want to just point out real quick as we're talking about crimp tubes is a crimp tube variety pack is a great idea - yeah so I have a little variety pack here so technically where do they go where's my Sirhan's okay here I have three sizes of crimp tubes and I've got my plier which will crimp all three and I'm set that's all I need that's great I love that yeah I know these are one of your favorite they are so yeah so and please keep the questions coming or loving answering the questions I think we go back to cat really quick and she's gonna talk a little bit about pearl knotting has some tour that alright so I love to do pearl knotting so I've actually kind of started a piece here and I wanted to use a nice colorful blue cord against the white pearl so you could really see so pearl adding is just sort of adding little nuts in between a little pearl and this is often done with pearls or gemstones because what it does is it really just protects those pearls from kind of smashing up against each other this is a little different technique this is sort of an alternative to stringing so a really just great little thing to use with this so I'm using a Griffin silk here and what I love about Griffin silk is that it actually comes with this twisted wire needle attached to the end of the silk so you can actually see that it's actually right in there but on the off chance that let's say I didn't want to use all of this silk for my project so I ended up cutting it off and then I ended up cutting off the end with the wire needle we actually do sell flexible twisted wire beading needles and these that we use for a lot of different things and you're going to need some of these if you're doing some of our rapid looms where you're going to need that extra needle but what happens is they have these nice little eyes here and these are totally flexible it's a nice little piece of wire here so you can just slip the eye onto the end there it's very nice and then what happens is you can just sort of pull it and it'll kind of kink on to your little Griffin silk there so it becomes a nice little wire needle so just so a great little thing to add to and I love that the pack comes with 50 because they're so delicate and tiny and you can just keep keep reusing them actually which is really fun ok I'm going to show you really quickly how did you some pearl matting so I just finished a knot here so I have my twisted wire needle attached to my Griffin silk and I'm just gonna slip on my bead and pull it all the way down and the tool that I'm going to use and this is kind of why I wanted to show this to you guys today is to use these little bent nose tweezers now these are really nice they actually fit really nicely in the hand so what I'm going to do is just kind of do a little wrap and a little knot they're just an overhand knot just pulling all my Griffin silk all the way through but how the tweezers are going to come in is I'm gonna put them through that hole and grip right next to my pearl there so I have just the tip right there and all I'm gonna do is just pull my knot and get it nice and close and tight and then just sort of slip out my tweezers and then I'm just gonna kind of come over and just sort of push that knot down just so it sits right next to that pearl so that I have no slack in between my two knots there so my pearl is nice and secure so these are a great little tool again because they have such a teeny tiny little pincher there and they have that nice little or economic Fed knows they're so just some great little tweezers also these are just great to have on hand if you try to pull a knot through or anything like that so if anything ever gets stuck these are a great thing to have on your table and I think before you talk about anything else we have another question a station okay her question is what do you do if the hole of your bead or your pearl is not big enough so we actually have a bead reamer mm-hmm and you can use that on pearls and it helps to widen that hole I would not recommend using an awesome thing like a glass bead though it's really meant for pearls but you can definitely do that and it works really well you can widen it to the point where you can get your stringing material through it well and we do have different different sizes of fie dreamers as well so if you're just trying to open it just a little bit you know you can start there and then if you need it to be a little bit wider you can just keep sort of twisting it through it basically it looks like a little file Ted file and it just kind of goes right through you're the center of the bead and you just kind of move your hand unfortunately I didn't think to hold on I'm sorry we do have a video though yes we do a video and I know we'll provide the link to you guys below here so you can see that but that's okay that's a great little tool to have on hand as well just get a little a little file absolutely so do you want to talk about your punches or should I talk about my memory wire bracelets you know why don't you get started on the memory wire bracelet all right so this is a really fun project we always get a lot of really positive feedback I think people love memory wire bracelets Kat made this one here and you can see that it keeps its shape even when you bend it so that was a really pretty bracelet did she did using noodle beads and this assortment of beads right here and I pulled out a different assortment and I'm going to show you how to make a single loop one I was thinking you know what valentine's Day is coming up so I did a little pink purple with the little hearts and I want to talk to you about the tools you're going to use so memory wire requires memory wire cutters do not please please please do not use any other cutter than memory wire cutters memory wire I pulled out a tool you might be tempted to use this is azor on a maxi shear cutter it cuts up to 14 gauge wire it is quite heavy even this one will still be damaged with memory wire it is so strong and it needs to be strong to keep its shape so definitely use your memory wire cutters and this is what they look like and to make a single loop one I'm just going to separate the memory wire out a little bit and I'm going to cut it so that it overlaps by about an inch and I've just put it between the two blades and I'm gonna cut and it cuts it super easy and it does not create a ding I cannot tell you how many pliers how many cutters I have little holes in them now because I tried to cut it and it actually does create like a little hole in your plier it runs your pliers it is but thankfully there's a cutter form so if you like doing memory wire projects the memory wire rate tool I also want to show you a really nice round nose plier now this is a Linstrom plier and this is one of cat's personal favorites I pulled it off of her desk and I wanted to show this one because of that nice fine tip so this is another really essential tool we have a quite a variety of round nose pliers to choose from on our website but it's a really nice tool for making loops and we had had that question earlier about the snowflakes and the wire forms and the way you would end one of those wire forms after one of those um if you're not familiar with our snowflakes they're basically like criss-crossing straight wires six of them and they're soldered in the middle and then you put beads on all the different arms and then at the end you need a way to finish it and a great way to finish it is by doing this creating a little loop so you just put the wire between the noses of the round nose plier and you Bend and it creates a little loop and it will prevent your beads from sliding off now if your loop ends up a little bit sideways you can still go ahead and use your normal chain nose pliers to just straighten that up a little bit and now that is my bee stopper and so I'm gonna recreate this bracelet here and show you how to finish it and just start stringing some random beads from this really pretty assortment and while Julie is doing a little bit of strain there we have a question okay alright so my question is how is memory wire different from craft wire and does it come in different sizes and by different sizes I think II mean gauges perhaps but the cool thing about memory wire is that it actually does come in different sizes now Julie is wearing the bracelet that I made there which is wonderful and it actually can kind of expand and contract so what's nice is it doesn't need to be a certain size now we do have a memory wire that is a circle and we do have a memory wire that is an oval we also have memory wire that is for necklace size so if you're looking to make something or actually it's it's also really great if you want to create a component so what you can do is you can take like a half a loop and now you've created a little Crescent so you can do wire wrapping or stringing on that and just sort of create your own little component and it'll really keep its shape the difference with craft wire is that it usually has a copper core which can make it a little bit more bendable which is great to work with so you can use softer tools with it but you can only work harden it so much memory wire is going to be a lot harder from the beginning and it'll keep its shape craft wire can get kinked I mean even after you've worked hardened it sometimes you can kind of crumple it with your hand depending on the gauge that you're using now craft wire does offer you different gages you can do sixteen fourteen eighteen all the way up to thirty thirty-two which is really really fine so there's a lot of different options for that but memory wire is a really different wire in my opinion than a craft wire and it does have a lot of different applications yeah I think if you are wanting to make a bracelet such as this that you want that nice round loop I would I would stick with the memory wire it really does retain its shape that's I think its main property is it's really meant to retain its shape and that's why it's so hard to cut that's why you need a special cutter for it because it's not meant to be easily like bent out of shape right you know it's meant to be pretty strong and pretty solid and you see I'm just putting all these beads on it and my loop is staying intact it's a nice solid round shape and it is one size fits all which is nice because it really does expand and we do have a couple projects showing you how to make a member wire cuff so that is also I think that was one of our best projects from this last year so you can definitely check it out in that product collection on our website but what's the great thing about that is that it still holds its shape even though you've now cut it apart and made it tough right so again you can kind of get the different sizes from there but it really the loops are I want to say they are 2.5 inches yes if I'm being correct I hope I am but they do expand like as you can see Julie's wearing my bracelet there but if she were to push it up a little bit higher on her wrist it would just simply expand yeah it wouldn't necessarily become you know it just sort of becomes a different size right if you if you were a little bit larger or what-have-you so but the ovals are actually a really great thing because then they lay a little flatter but those have a little different style as well we do you have some projects using that and I know we have a lot of people who make and sell jewelry and memory wire bracelets are great because you'd have to worry about sizing absolutely so if you are making some jewelry to give us a gift or you're selling it is a really nice relief to not worry about sizing I know so that's kind of a fun thing about it too so I'm almost done and we do have another question as I'm putting on my last few beads okay do you have any tips or for keeping memory wire and other findings from tarnishing biggest tip is put them in a ziploc bag I actually have tarnish resistant yeah oh yeah great idea and tarnish resistant strips yep so those are three different things you can do so I I would put them in a ziploc bag when you're not using him whether it's a regular Ziploc or tarnish resistant I put the little tarnish resistant pad in it and then the other tip is if you are having a lot of tarnishing happening with your own personal jewelry just look at your habits are you showering with it are you putting on perfume after you put on your necklace and do you have lotion yeah so those things can help to accelerate the tarnish process especially I know this is something that we all think about but clean your jewelry every every once in a while you know I mean I I wish I could do it every time I check out my pair of earrings I just sometimes I don't think about it but every once in a while like when you go to clean your makeup brushes clean your jewelry to just just wipe them off you know there's lots of alcohol that you can use depending on the the metal finish of course but you know just just clean up your jewelry and make sure it's all pretty and nicely packaged yeah so so I hope that helped give you some ideas of where to start so I'm ready to finish my bracelet all right so you see that did not take long and I love this variety pack because fun to just have an assortment of beads so I've got just a little bit left here it's a little over a quarter of an inch and I'm just going to take my round nose plier again and it's nice because I can make this loop any size I want I think this is about where I had the other loop and I'm just working it around and there we go we've got my loop and now what I'm gonna do because I did want to show you a very basic skill here which is good for everything is just opening a jump ring so I've got my chain nose and I think I'm gonna use my neurons just keep coming in handy cuz these are the foreign ones so I'm going to take one of these little heart charms that comes with an oval jump ring attached to it I'm just gonna open that jump ring slide it on to my loop and close it on up you can do that on the other side as well I love these little like puff heart charms okay I don't put this on the other side as well and you see how these work together so that's a nice thing is because often times you do need that second chain nose pliers so if you don't want to have two identical tools it's nice to have this for one and we're done we made a little second memory wire bracelet no it's so amazing yeah very easy so I think cat is gonna now show us another tool I know we're trying to move along here because yeah I've been talking for a while but we definitely show you all these fun tools so I'm gonna show you this really quickly we do have videos on how to use the macrame boards but I just kind of wanted to show you the size difference between the mini macrame board and the large one here and there was a large one here is what you're going to get making away today but the mini one is I'll just kind of turn down that side so you can really see that it's about half the size so the great thing about this guy here is that it's great for travel because it actually holds your cords in place so I started this little bracelet here now this is just a very simple square knot using some hemp cord and I wanted to add just little beads on the side there so just very very simple but what's nice is that it has this nice little ruler that goes across and down and what's also great is that it holds your cords in place so that if you ever need to put it down you can just pick it up so you don't have to worry about it getting all knotted and everything like that so kind of keeps it all nice and in place for you so we do have videos showing you how to do this but I just want to show this is a really great little tool and I like that it's nice and lightweight you can use it for many different applications and it's great to travel with so if you want to just do a little macrame or whatever as you are on the plane or in a car is a great little tool alright so the last thing that I have to show here is I'm going to show a couple little hole punchers now this you're going to want to use with some metal hole punchers here now I have the round 1.25 millimeters we do have a couple of other different sizes and this is the Europe hunch but I wanted to pull these ones out today so that I could show you a really neat little trick so one of the things that can happen is if you take a piece like this and you want to use it and just hole punch what can happen is you can actually end up marring this little piece just a little bit so what I recommend is actually placing a little piece of paper towel over it so that when you line up your hole punch and you can kind of gauge it on the back there so let's say I want a hole punch right there towards the corner I'm just going to put right through that paper towel and now I won't have that nice little or that nasty little mark on it so I have a nice little clean hole right on the front there so when you're choosing the size that you want to use I would definitely recommend looking to maybe the size jump ring that you want to use you might need something that has a larger hole and then I just want to kind of use my same little piece here and show you this little guy now this is great if you're trying to drill rivet holes and what's nice is that you can see on the top here let me kind of turn them around I hope you can see this on camera we have the 1.5 millimeter and the 2 millimeter now these are great you just kind of set your piece in there and I'm not really gonna focus too much on where it's gonna be here make sure I'm going the right way there we go alright so I'm just gonna get it down there and then punch my little hole and then I'm just gonna undo it there and I have my nice little hole so really super simple again we do have another video I I'm rushing a little bit because I want to try to get this wrapped up for us today but some great little hole punch tools as well so you'll find these in our product collection for today and I do want to note with this one what surprises me is you don't have to use a lot of strength no it looks like I do but this like crankshaft really does the work for you and it's very easy to do and then one tip I wanted to share is if you do know specifically where you want your hole take a little fine tip permanent marker yes and make a little dot and you'll be able to see that when you're lining it up and you're just gonna punch right over that dot so you're not going to worry about ink on there on your piece but it's a great little tip yeah and then we did a question hi Angie oh do you know how to pop when the hole is complete I think you do you kind of notice like a little give yeah you can you can kind of feel and it's like tight and then it goes yeah then you're like oh there you go yeah very easy though super super easy yeah and then I think I'm gonna grab your tray here I'm sort of sharing so I want to show you another tool that you often we're not often but you might want to use in conjunction with some blanks so we have a lot of swarovski flatbacks crystals we have some that are hotfix and some that are not hotfix and these ones here are not hot fixing so they're really pretty now this is a magic pick because I'm often like well how do you get that here let's say we wanted to do a little design I would recommend using again your G's hypo cement and you could place little dots and then to pick up your little flat backs we have this tool right here and this says right on it magical pick and you see it has this nice little kind of tacky tip to it and what you're going to do is you're just going to place it on top of your stone and it picks it up you can move it around and then once you've got your glue dot it will just stick in the glue and release and you can do that time and time again and then if you want to adjust the position you've got this nice pointed tip end and you can just scoot them so this is a super handy tool if you like using these flat backs and then if you use this time and again and this kind of loses its tackiness it comes with this great little like recharge your pad so you just put a little bit of scotch tape in and you just clean it you roll it on there and press it down a few times and it returns that stick to it and then you're just able to pick up these pretty little flat backs and QS it with all different sizes of flat box you can also use it with tongs as well oh you can use it with Shakhtar's working with crystal clay mhm this is a great little tool yeah so this is one of our staples in the design space it really it's kind of a mystery how do you get those guys onto here you could try to easer I was gonna say go ahead and try the tweezer go for it Julie alright well I've done this before alright fine okay I was pretty sure they'll be flying across the room before it like and then I'm out of flat back yeah this is definitely I think the preferred method you know I think it gives you a little bit more ability and where you're putting it as opposed to trying to tweezer it around so another nice thing is if you do have any shaking this to your hand a chaser can be difficult this you know even if your hand is a little bit shaky this is gonna be really forgiving and that's gonna be nice to be able to pick those up yes absolutely alright so we are down to one last tool but before we show that to you we want to review the giveaway so you have one last chance to leave some comments to enter our giveaway and so we are got the large macrame board we have the bead Stoppers the thread zap and this complete tool kit and all you need to do is leave a comment alright so last chance leave your comment really quick while Julie shows us our last little tip and trick and with our last little tool here so go ahead alright essentially I have tool magic so this is a really cool substance and I'm counting this as a tool because we use it with tools so this is essentially a paint or coating that you put on the tips of your pliers to prevent them from marring your wire so if you do a lot of wire work this is great so I've already pre coded one and I know you can't feel this because you're watching this but it's a little bit rubbery it's not tacky it's smooth it's dried and it's a little bit rubbery and that is going to help to prevent little Mars and nicks on your wire as you're working with if you're tugging your wire maybe you're doing chainmail this would be great for chainmail because actually gonna give you a little bit more grip to it's a little not sticky and I wants a sticky but it's like a little bit of rubber yeah so it does give you that I want to show you how to use this so if you look inside this let me set up a little bit of a bill station just in case because you never know alright so if you open this up this is what it looks like inside it looks like white paint or white glue and I'm gonna take my sarong Shana's and you're gonna stir it up and all you need to do submerge the tips and pull them out and you see now they're coated and I let mine dry overnight just to be on the safe side I don't think you actually need to let it dry that long please check the product description I don't think it's overnight I had prepped mine for this class by letting it dry overnight but that's it so I like to kind of hold him for a few minutes as it's super wet and then what I do is I just put the lid back on oh and you don't do that you don't squeeze them together after you've done that but you see it's actually already starting to dry so that's like a good note of how good little tests there Julian test absolutely absolutely okay what I would normally do is not squeeze them together and keep them open and just set them on something to dry yes so that's what you do and do not spit right after you do that but we do have another question so okay it's tool magic latex and I almost just squeeze these guys again let me check the description yeah we do want to let you guys know if you do have a question about what material something isn't it is not listed please let us know because when we definitely want to help you out and two we want to make sure that it is listed so that the next person you know I will be able to find out exactly what's what's in the some of the products that we sell so we definitely want to help you guys out so if you ever have a question or if it's not listed just asked yeah and please go ahead Angie and we will research that for you I am not seeing it on the actual jar so I think that is a very important question to answer so we will answer that question for you and get back to you to your comments but we just need to do a little bit of research it might be on the actual physical packaging like a card that this comes with so we'll check that out for you in let you know yes mm-hmm all right we are just about ready to announce our giveaway winner so thank you so much for joining us we hope we gave you some ideas or introduced you to some new tools that you might not have known about keep leaving comments we do continue to check them for the next several days even weeks we check back and always reach out to us with other questions and thank you again and a Happy New Year let's see who our is alright so our winner is Sandra Morgan Ellis congratulations so we will be go ahead and send us a note you at service at beadaholique and beadaholique.com just a message at service at beadaholique.com and we'll get your information so that we can send out this beautiful giveaway to you congratulations thank you so much for joining us everybody and I'm so sorry about my coughs I feel really terrible but I'm feeling better so we'll be back next week and we'll have lots of great new things for you guys and we'll be doing another class in February so stay tuned yeah and please join us again next Wednesday because we do beat table Wednesday every Wednesday where you can check in with us and again that's a really great time to talk to us and see what worked - all right happy new year everyone thanks for joining us
good morning everyone happy 2018 oh my gosh already thank you so much for joining us here in the beadaholique studios I'm Julie beam and mrs. cat Sylvia hi everyone if you haven't joined us before it every month we do one of these classes where we try to teach you something new about jewelry making or review tools which is the topic of this course down here we're going to talk all about the great tools and designer must-have tools for your jewelry making a wide variety of different techniques and types of jewelry making projects so thank you so much for joining us we hope your new year has been off to a great start we would love to hear how you're doing if you have not joined us before you might not know that we do a giveaway each and every one of these classes all right so first off is this macrame board and this is great for your braiding and knotting projects it has a wonderful grid and a ruler on the top and these little notches to anchor your threads we have a thread zap and we have this great tool kit and these wonderful bead Stoppers so we're gonna show you how to use a thread zap and how to use the bead Stoppers and the macrame board and and during this class and we're also going to open up this tool kit now to win all you need to do is leave a comment in the comment section and it could be any comment it can be a question that you have about what we're talking about we would love to hear your questions this is really your opportunity to interact with us and ask us questions we'll answer them live here you could tell us what your New Year's resolution would be we'd love to hear that which you're gonna be working on 2018 if you have some beading projects in mind it can even just be a Hello I'm tuning in from New York or Sweden or wherever it is we'd love to hear that we have so much fun reading those comments so let's go ahead and start our class let's start yapping about tools so there are so many different tools out there and each of the tools that you see here are available at beadaholique.com and there's more information on each of them in the product listings but we are going to start with some great tools that I really think are essential so I know we're kind of panning over the table you see we've got ones for stringing we've got ones for metalwork for memory wire bracelet so we've got looms but I'm gonna start right over here and I'm going to be making an earrings I don't want to just show you what these tools can look like I really want to show you how we use them so this is the earring I'm gonna be making here and I actually was able to make I was actually able to make this earring hook and I had not used this tool before prepping for this class actually was a tool that cat had had some fun experimenting with and now I love it I definitely want to get one of these and make my own earring hooks because it was so easy so what we're going to be doing is using this wire jig by artistic wire and for it we're going to be using 20 gauge artistic wire in gold so we're going to make the earring finding first and I am going to start out by pulling off some wire and I want about four or five inches and you notice it's a little bit kinky so here is a great tool to straighten out your wire it's a nylon jaw pliers and you see we've used this a lot but the nylon jaws are still in really great shape so what we're gonna do is I'm gonna hold onto the spool now this is a little tip when you are straightening wire if possible keep it on the spool as long as you can because this gives you something to grip on Jim and just grab that wire between those nylon jaws and pull and that really helps to straighten out the wire you could go from a couple different angles to and we do actually have the replacements for the nylon jaw pliers as well so if you do a lot of wire work and you end up wearing them out we should we have actually a great video showing you how to replace the little tips you can keep using your pliers year after year and just replace those you see there's little screws right there and we have a video showing you how to do it next I'm gonna use my favorite cutter so this is a beadsmith cutter I love it I just it's got a nice fine tip to it and I'm gonna cut about five inches off using that cutter and I'm actually going to now hand this wire over to Kat because she's gonna be using it in her next project and here is this wire J I'm gonna have it face me so that I can see what I'm doing a little bit better but then I'll turn it around so you can see it so we're gonna put our wire through the hole and we're gonna do about 3/4 of an inch or so just enough to anchor it that's our anchor now we're gonna go around this little triangle on the inside of that first little dowel up and around that nice big circle shape on the inside of that other dowel and we're gonna bring our wire all the way around and make a loop and now this also comes with this little tool and this is a pusher tool so if you set it down on your table this goes right over those metal dowels and you can push your wire down and that really helps for it to lay straight now it's time to go ahead and pull this off the jig so I'm gonna go ahead pull that back up and I'm gonna just cut it I know I'm not going to need that little piece and I'm gonna carefully just pull it off of my wire jig we can cut it right here too so it came right off perfect okay so where my wire crisscross is I want to go ahead and cut I'm gonna take my cutter cut it so I've got a nice loop and now I can decide how long I want this piece to be so that's gonna be the part that goes into your ear you can make it really long or you can make it short come in and make it a little bit on the shorter side and just cut it and now I'm gonna take my very favorite chain nose plier these fine points of them and they're really quite lightweight which is nice as well and their grips are very comfortable like a nice rubber grip so I'm gonna straighten out my little loop with my pliers real quick and now I want to flatten this I want to work harden it a little bit so I'm going to be using a wire whacker tool now this is great you can use it with a hammer or without and normally you would use it on your table but because we have so much set up here I'm not on my table so what you would normally do you've got these two plates you would set it down on your table like so and you would whack it like you're you can even go ahead and put the plates down and take like a rubber mallet and hammer it on top of it I'm gonna do it in the air because I don't want to disturb my table here but you see how this is just sitting upright a little bit it's not quite flat here we go sorry for the how loud this is going to be so I'm really really just whacking it like it says it's a wire whacker tool and that's gonna help to fit as well as work hard in it sorry guys we do have to apologize for the occasional little cough yes I'm so sorry guys I was oh it ended up being a little sick over the holidays which was not fun but I'm back in here alright so now we're gonna use another cool tool this is a wire around our tool so we're gonna go ahead and smooth out that cut edge on our wire because we want it to feel good when it goes through our ear we don't want any little burrs or bits of metal so we're just going to take this little cup and put it over the tip of the wire and rotate it and you can even move it around a little bit so we're just getting rid of any little sharp bits of metal so that when this goes through your ear it's nice and smooth and that's really gonna go ahead and make this a nice complete finding so it's really fun to make your own findings can be a little intimidating to start but once you've done a couple you're just gonna love making them so there we have a matching earring hook and with this wire jig tool it's really nice because they're always going to be uniform now I'm going to show you how to use another one of my favorite tools and that is a wire looping plier so if you've seen some of our videos we have almost 1,500 videos and you'll see that I use these three tools a lot I love them this is probably my absolute favorite must-have designer tool and it is a wire looping plier and what it does for you I mean it takes the Swarovski faux pearl and I put it on my ball head pin and I'm going to grip it right above where the wire exits the bead and squeeze and it just made half my loop for me go ahead pull that wire down rotate my pliers up to the top and so I am able to know I can keep it in this pair of pliers or I can switch to a chain nose let's see that just made a lovely loop and now I'm just gonna twist it around and trim it off and tuck in my tail and now what we can do because we did work hard in this and it is a really nice finished earring hook we're just gonna open that loop slide on our wrapped wire loop and we have a finished earring so these are some great tools and you can use them for a variety of projects but these are some wonderful essential must-have tools and a couple of the skills we just learned right there you can apply to a lot of different jewelry making projects so that was my first project showcasing my first tools and now Kat is gonna show us some more tools for making your own wire components as well yes I'm Julie may I actually borrow yours Iran flush cutters ma thank you alright so I made this pair of earrings I did this fully in the video but I just want to show you the tools that I use to do this now these are really great these are from the beadsmith and these are looping pliers now this one has a square looping and this one is a round looper so if you could just kind of look at the noses on those you'll sort of see the different sizes and just looking really up-close it's easier to see here on the square one but they have lovely little guides here so you have two millimeter three four and then on this nose five six seven and eight so this allows you to get a really nice consistent loop because the thing that I have trouble with when I am wire working is getting that nice consistency so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to kind of show you how to use the square pliers here just really quickly I'm not going to do a full project like Julie but just kind of a full little demonstration here so what I want to do is I'm gonna make a four millimeter square loop here so what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna kind of set my wire in there just like so and across the tip you'll notice you just need to set it just a little bit across just like so alright so I have it there so I'm just going to bend it around and then I have my nice little kink and it's a nice little sharp kink there so I'm just going to rotate and again just line it up with my guide of my four millimeters and press down again so now you can see and then rotate it one more time and press down one more time there we go and now what I'm gonna do is you can see that I have my nice little square so I'm gonna set it in there one more time and now what I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to press that up just a little bit so I have made a little decorative head pin there so this can actually be really fun and you can see I use something similar here to create this and then just add it a little loop but I just want to say that these are really wonderful tools to get a nice consistency because especially when you're making earrings you can just see how nice and consistent those loops are and if you tried to do that and with any other tool you're gonna have a little bit of trouble and that's also another great thing that you can do these are again by the beadsmith and these are just those little step-down pliers so you're getting a nice little mandrel kind of style here but you're getting a nice consistent loop so that's just a nice little thing for some of our wire looping pliers and if you're doing a lot of wire work I definitely recommend them I can't wait to play with these a little bit more and make some fun clasps and components so I'm excited to play around with them a little bit more it's a really versatile tool yeah you can really absolutely so you got chilly I have some metalworking tools great bracelet and then stretch bracelet using a variety of tools so let's go take the metal cuff first so I have these wonderful blanks and these are just flat I'm gonna come in a variety of the width and this is an easy bender tool and it's really specifically made to bend this metal so we're gonna make the cuff so what you do is you take this blank an you see it has these nice smooth edges and again you can find this at beadaholique.com and Rachel who's helping us with questions she can provide you the link for that so go ahead and bend it and we're gonna bend it not all the way I'm not bending it fully away and then we're gonna go to the other side and bend it as well and again we're not going to bend it fully I'm just gonna bend it almost almost all the way but we don't want to do this we don't want to create a divot or a kink in the middle so there's what we've got so far now what we're gonna do is we're gonna take our bracelet bending plier and you see it's got these nylon jaws so it won't disturb the metal and it's got that nice Bend to it as well now we're just gonna work our way around it you see how it's really forming very nicely we're just going around and around just giving that a little extra a nice curve to it and you see how perfect that is it's a really nice smooth shape and the nylon jaws are great because they're really not disturbing that metal or marking it or bending it so there we have a cuff bracelet you can do it with any width of it comes in a variety of widths and a variety of metals so that is the nylon jaw bracelet bending pliers and the ez bender tool now really a quite opposite style of bracelet is a stretch bracelet I have a couple examples here now we got in a tool a couple months ago and it was really one of those like wait this is so cool why wasn't this around before yeah and that is this stretch cord needle and so this is about ten point seven five inches and it's meant to be used with beads that have a hole that is one millimeter or larger if you have beads that are smaller than that I would recommend a big eye needle I want to show you what that looks like real quick so a big eye needle is great because it's slender but it has if we see that has a really nice big eye and so for this project we are going to be using some opal on which is a nice stretch cord I have cut a length that's about 15 16 inches and I placed a bead stopper on the end bead Stoppers are great for stringing projects as well as stretch projects and they're basically this nice little coil and we are giving this away in the giveaway so please do leave those comments to enter the giveaway but you just push these two little tabs together and put it on the end so I've pre-cut my stretch fiber and if I was using smaller hole beads I would just put this nice big eye needle right through that this stretch fiber through the big eye needle and then I'd be able to string my beads but I'm going to show you this needle here so I'm going to recreate this bracelet these are wonderful vintage beads right here and I'm just going to put them on to my needle and you see that it's got that nice stopper down at the bottom and what's nice is you can go ahead and play with your pattern and just take your beads on and off the needle without having to take them on and off the stretch cord so you're not going anywhere you can make it as long or short as you want and once you've got all the beads that you want what you're going to do is you're going to take your stretch cord now and put it on the black here so you can see a little bit better just hook it at the end of that needle and then there they go and they're on the stretch cord I love it too it's been really fun to play with where has this been all my stretch cord life I know exactly so then what you would do to finish your bracelet is you would just take your two ends and knot them together like so and I would do a nice secure knot right there and then for an added measure of security I would apply a little bit of the GS hypo cement for time restraints I'm not going to do that here on camera but you would just put a dab of it if you look at this it has a really nice fine needle point and so then you would just go ahead and apply that to your knot let it dry and then your ends and that is how you make a stretch bracelet using that really cool tool I love it and I also do I want to make sure that these get enough attention to because we use these big eye needles all the time especially kumihimo braiding we use these a lot because we're using like an S LAN cord which is a little too thick to go through a traditional needle so we use these big eye ones all the time and we love them so I think Kat now is going to show us a little bit more of her favorite tools yeah so I I'm gonna kind of continue our little bracelet but I'm gonna kind of move on to bead weaving a little bit so if you have done any type of peyote you've probably had a little trouble trying to get your cords to clip off so some people do use flush cutters I personally don't recommend that what I recommend is using a thread zapper now we have a couple of different types of thread zappers we have this one which is a nice compact one from the beadsmith and then we have the thread zap - also from the beadsmith but this has a little bit more of that exposed thing I'm sorry it exposed that burr I guess I'll call it this one is nice you take off the guard and you just press up so you get that nice little thing and by pressing it up that tip is heating up right now so what you want to do is just kind of leave it open for a moment and then I'm gonna take it down to my beadwork here and I want to get it nice and close and what's gonna happen is it's just gonna zap off that thread so now you can't even tell where that thread used to be so the nice thing is is you can kind of see I'll try to hold it up against my hand here I don't know if that'll help but what happens is it actually sort of Sears the end so you get that nice little sort of it almost beads up as though it's wax so you'll get a nice little seared end and that will also help it stay nice and knotted in your work so you don't have to worry about it slipping through now I did of course finna do a finishing technique where I added some knots here but this is a great little thing and it's also nice if you have the kiddos around to keep the nice guard there so that it won't stay out and be hot so I recommend this one this is a great to use and it just takes a couple of triple-a batteries so nice and compact to bring with you alright so that is one of the little tools that I like to use while bead weaving I think before you go on to the next one we don't have a quick questionable okay a couple questions not stretch bracelets okay so we had a couple questions which is your preferred stretch cord to use so we really like opal on I have it right here this is a really nice stretch fiber it's very silky it's very smooth and it does not stretch out it I think with a stretch bracelet is important to keep in mind over time if you do keep wearing it time and time and time again eventually it's going to stretch out it is it's just the nature of the type of project that it is but this is a really nice quality stretch cord we really like using it and then the other question was how do you keep it from coming undone so my best recommendation is to use that GS hypo cement on your knots so make sure you tie a double knot you know a triple knot yeah and then even some anchoring knots within the bracelet you can leave your tails a little bit long feed them back through maybe use a big eye needle feed them back through your beads and then at another point tie another knot and add a little bit more glue yeah I definitely like to if the space allows feed it back through that way it's just a little extra security and another tip is your beads are important too if you use really heavy beads that can become a problem it can really cause your bracelet to come apart it just because of the sheer weight of the beads and the pressure it's putting on those knots in the stretch cord also be careful of sharp beads something like a gemstone bead is really not ideal for a stretch cord they tend to have sharper edges and that can cut the stretch fiber so maybe use a stringing material such as a beading wire instead and I think we have another question how long does it take per hypo cement to dry oh really good question yeah I think it's pretty quick I don't think I've ever timed it I would say let it dry an hour limit pardon me one thing that I like to do is in the example that Julie did here what you can actually do is add the GS hypo cement to the knot and then kind of slide the bead over the knot so that it kind of glues that underneath the bead so that you're not gluing like two beads together you're kind of sliding it over that way it also adds that little security and it's now glued to that particular bead yeah so that's one thing that you can do that I know I like to do that it helps secure my knots a little bit but yeah I would say Gia's hypo cement does dry fairly quickly however I would try to give it 24 hours before good right I start taking it on and off and just and really wearing it out so let it set be patient yeah let it set but then you should be good I'd say solidly after 24 hours yeah that's a very good recommendation so yeah but I like using Gia's hypo cement so is so I pull my so like if I've got this here if you see this example here if I was to put the Jesus hypo cement on that knot which I would do I would then go and tug this a little more yeah trying to get it into the knot so instead of just laying it on top and trimming your tails I would definitely tug it a little bit more so it can really kind of seep into the inner workings of the knot yeah kind of get in the in the fibers of the cord mm-hmm exactly so all right so I'm going to continue here I have a couple of looms and this is gonna give me a little opportunity here to talk about the two different types of jewel limbs that we have so we have the baby jewel in which I have here and the regular jewel loom now I've set up a piece of work on my little baby loom here and the nice thing about this is that it does come completely set up so it will be nice and curved for you with the regular jewel loom you'll actually have to do a little bit of setup but what's nice is that it does come and comes flat so that's why I don't want to set anything up here so ours has been bent into place so we love the tools like it is that pretty set up for us here but you can use this metal rod that comes with it and it will sort of set up and sort of bow your jewel loom for you it's actually a very nice easy setup and then your tooling is all set to go so the baby jewel loom is nice in addition to the jewel room because it is literally half the size so you can just kind of see that I've lined up my ends and we're about half the size here what's nice is that you can create smaller pieces without using as much thread and the cool thing about the baby loom is that you can actually loom with wire so if you've ever tried to do that you definitely don't want to use the full loom because you're gonna lose a lot of that wire going back and forth so what's nice is you can actually use it on the baby loom and create really great little wire Fogle's so it's gonna give me an opportunity to talk about our new kits and these are our January kits and these are our looms statement earrings and these were made using the baby Joule loom so just some really fun things so I know people always think of loom as bracelets or sometimes even necklaces but you can actually make a really great statement earring so these are the four varieties that we have for our kits this month and these are featuring a really gorgeous swarovski crystal here at the bottom and we do sell these in refill kits as well so be sure to check that out that is available at beadaholique.com and that should be on our homepage today so be sure to check that out and cat designed all of these and they are so gorgeous that's so much fun we have me weaving patterns I really really do so I want to kind of give them all their own little personality and another thing that's great is if you buy one full kit and you buy the others as refills the same beads you'll get the same number of beads so let's say you wanted to make this pattern but with the pink white and gray you can do that because you'll get the same the right amount of beads to make any I'll just walk the color palette swap them out Oh sounds fun I know kind of a neat little fun thing that I wanted to do cuz I know our refill kits are very popular so I know that you guys love those so I wanted to kind of make it a little extra extra special this time yeah and then it's nice because with the kits you do get the pattern yes what and get the full color pattern which which is really nice and it's easy to follow so yeah so we love these he did such a good job thank you I think we have another question before we go on okay you changed the tip it's it's very simple I'm gonna do this without touching it because it's probably still a little warm so there is a way to what you're gonna do is you're going to want to take out the batteries so that you don't warm this up but you simply remove it and then you just put the other one in we have a video showing you how to exactly how to do that we do sell the replacement tips as well you can also let me just put my brace back on here on the threads app - you can actually see this a little bit easier so that black piece at the top there that just pulls right out and that whole tip is the replacement tip now when to replace it is kind of up to you you'll start to notice when it doesn't start to work and if the batteries if the switching the batteries doesn't help it's probably time to replace the tip also I know that some people will use this with some different cords so what can happen is a little bit of that cord will actually end up melted onto your tip if that does happen what you can try to do is warm up your tip and try to get that off very carefully I would use some pliers but go ahead and replace the tip I use these a lot but honestly I don't think I've replaced the tips on these guys and maybe a year or two yeah it doesn't happen very often that's a long time yeah but we do sell the replacement absolutely we can continue to use the tool so alright so I going back to loom real quick one of the things I want to talk to you about and you can actually kind of see it so this is the cord that I use and it was sort of the interior corner of my last little spool of Nemo so it's really if nice and king - which is a little frustrating to work with because it can kind of knot up a little bit but I'm gonna show you a little trick here and this is actually using beeswax so what this thing is is this is just a little bit of beeswax there and then you just take your naima cord lay it across and then just kind of pull it through and what's going to happen is it's just gonna coat that little nemo and a little bit of that beeswax and then you can just kind of run your fingers along it but what's gonna happen is it'll kind of pull it out for you so it'll be a little bit straighter you can actually already see on the ends there where it's getting a nice and straight for me so straighter i'll say yes you just pull it through your nice little beeswax there and it gives you a nice little coating and also helps to sort of just secure and make it a little bit a little bit stronger kind of conditions the thread as you work so we have a nice little beeswax and what's great is your hands don't get dirty because it comes with this nice little compact a little thing here and you can actually click this open there we go so you can actually kind of see the beeswax and you can rotate it as it starts to kind of you can see I have a few notches here that I've used over over time here but you can just kind of rotate it and then you have fresh beeswax at the top so just something fun and just some great little Loom tricks here for you I think this is a great time if you could hand me the giveaway donor talk a little bit more about the giveaway so if you are watching this live thank you again for joining us we do like to give a something away with all of our different wants a month live classes and so today we're giving away this tool kit and I want to open it up here so you can see what's actually inside and the way you enter the giveaway is by leaving a comment it could be a question it could be a Hello it can be anything so this is a great tool kit because one thing that I like about is it has a crimping plier a lot of toolkits don't so this has a crimping plier which is perfect cuz I'm going to show you how to use crimping pliers here next but it also has a nice sharp cutter a nylon jaw pliers of tweezers a bead scoop a chain nose plier another pair of cutters and around those pliers so with this you can do stringing projects you can do wire projects a whole bunch of different things you can do so a really nice solid tool kit so it has one thing we are giving away you're also giving away the thread zap - which you just heard Kat talk about the bead Stoppers which you've seen me work with and then the large macrame board and cats going to show you in a little bit how to use the smaller version but this is a really great fun tool as well so we just want to share some of our favorite tools with you for joining us and we do have another question before we move on hi Carol do you have to wax your thread as Carol's question and the answer is no you don't have to it's purely optional I like to do it especially with loom and and I do that because I know I'm gonna be doing multiple passes and usually my thread is quite long and it does help your thread from tangling and nodding on its own because it's just a little bit more slippery so it doesn't King as much it also straightens out your thread but it is purely optional you do not have to do it is a preference thing I personally like to do it but you don't have to all right so I'm gonna go with you oh thank you by the way thank you careful question and please keep sending them through I'm gonna go into some stringing techniques showing you some crimping pliers so I have three different crimping pliers and actually I would love to grab the crimper out of that tool kit that we're gonna be giving away real quick there you go all right so stringing is so much fun there's so many different things you can do with it I have a couple examples right here just some strung projects so here is really a traditional strung necklace it comes to a end here where we have a single loop on our clasp then here I have a bracelet I actually made this in our last Facebook and YouTube live class which was about fancy stones by Swarovski and this actually did a technique where it took the beading wire and it looped it around and then you actually ended up with all the strands that you needed to feed through the crimp bead which was kind of fun and then here is another strong bracelet and this is using two strands of beading wire coming to an end here on the two loops and you'll notice here I have crimp bead covers covering microbeads so let's talk a little bit about crimp beads and stringing because there's a bunch of different tools and you might be most familiar with the one that comes in the tool kit so this one here is a really a pretty traditional standard crimping plier it has the two notches one that's very much like a crescent shape and one that's an oval shape and you would crimp the crimp bead to begin with in that back notch and then you would fold it over on itself in that front notch and so this is a great standard tool but there's a couple other tools for crimping that you might not be aware of that we really love so I have this Iran foreign one crimping pliers so if this allows you to crimp three different sizes of crimp tubes a one millimeter a two millimeter end a three millimeter and I'm going to show you real quick how to do that and you might notice something special on my spool here I have a beetle on a spool tamer put on it and what this allows you to do and it's just a wonderful elastic cord and I thread the end thread at the end of my wire through it look I'm just pulling my wire without having to take off that plastic guard and it's keeping my wire from coming undone or becoming knotted so that's a fun tool too I am going to borrow my cutters so here I've got a length of beading wire and I'm not going to actually make a complete project so I'm not going to worry about the length too much I am going to put a bead stopper on the end to prevent my beads from coming undone and I'm just gonna go ahead and pretend that I'm just stringing some pretty beads and bead caps as if I was a slit all right so there's stopped there at the end and then let's say I want to go ahead and I want to attach one half of my toggle clasp so I would take a crimp bead and put it on it and this is a two by two crimp bead and then I'd thread it through the loop on my clasp and then I would go back down through that crimp bead and I always like to go through another adjacent bead if possible all right so it's made a nice loop and now I'm ready to crimp it now with this Iran foreign one regardless of what size crimp bead you're going to crimp all of them in this back notch that has really like a triangle shape to it so I'm going to place it in that triangle shape and crimp and it then mimicked that shape for me now because this is a two by two crimp tube I'm going to go ahead and place it in the middle notch of my plier right there and squishes was secured down so I just made my crimp bead and the foreign one is that it also is a chain nose plier so that's a cool tool because you not only get your crimping pliers but you get your chain nose pliers all right so now I want to show you another tool that does the same thing but it's just a different type of tool this is a double notch crimping plier maybe it looks a little bit better about with the gray no that's not here we go this was the one from the tool kit and this is the double notch so you'll notice it has an extra notch so this can crimp a two millimeter or a three millimeter crimp tube so I'm just going to cut off my crimp tube but real quick I should show you how nice that looks with that sir on four and one you see that fold over very nice and neat and you can easily cover it with a crimp bead baby couldn't bead cover I should say yep I'm just going to cut that off so I can show this again all right let's go ahead and put another crimp bead on there and we're going to do the same thing using the double notch so I think if you like to use a wide variety of beading wire thicknesses it might be a good reason to pick up a crimping plier that does more than one size well especially because you don't know until you try to if you've bought something and are trying to test it you know cuz it just it just also depends on how many strands are trying to get through there as well we're trying to do a multi strand thing yeah like this bracelet here I was definitely trying to do a multi strand yeah through that single crimp bead so I had to use a bigger crimp tube alright so this one here this is going to be for two millimeter and three millimeter so we're just putting this one in that middle notch and we do have a question here so the question is that real quick okay there we go and that is done with that double notch crimping plier wonderful so we do have a question to you the question is about how do you finish the snowflake forms and what tool would you use and someone suggested a memory wire plier you can I would suggest using a really good round nose plier I would suggest the brand blubbers they have a really nice strong plier to kind of give you that little loop at the end if that's what you're going for but yeah I don't I do you know what cuts those snowflake forms oh that's an excellent question um that's a really thick wire cuz it's meant to be I don't think I've ever cut it because it's usually pre-cut if I'm remembering right is it's kind of pre shaped like a snowflake and you put things on the end so what I've always trician aliy done is I've left it intact as is put all my beads on it and then I've used a round nose plier like you suggest like a rubber you just turn over the ends which actually imma show you exactly how to do that here in my next project well and I was just gonna say you could also use these I think as well if you're trying to get consistent leaves let's say you wanted to dangle something from the ends and you wanted a three millimeter loop or a two millimeter loop these are really good strong pliers you can kind of see how hefty these are yeah I'm here to something that might be a little bit more dainty so something like this would be good I would definitely recommend going for something kind of heavy-duty though cuz that wire is is strong that is a lot something that's got a nice good grip to it and so something like this I think yeah that would work as well for sure yeah all right so let's continue with your bracelet here okay I have one last crimping plier to show you and this has become a new favorite of mine and it's become a new favorite of mine thanks to Sarah Euler alright so this is the magical part and you see it looks quite different from the other crimpers it just has that one round little hole so if we look I made up a few samples here so this is what a traditional crimping plier crimped bead looks like you've got that little seam right there where you folded it over with the magical crimper it ends up just looking like a little bead there's no seam it's just like a really nicely formed round little bead so what's important to remember about the magical crimpers is it's actually really quite specific in the materials you want to use to get the best results you're going to want to use sterling silver or gold filled crimp tubes that are two by two you're also going to want to use more of a medium weight beading wire such as a point zero one eight point zero one nine something like that and this here is a nice medium weight one and you see it's that point zero one nine so we're going to go ahead and put a sterling silver two by two crimp tube on here and we're going to do the same beginning process where we just put on the loop on our clasp fold it over go back down through the crimp tube and down through another bead and pull it up so that we have that nice little loop now here is where things get a little bit off from what you normally do if you normally use a traditional crimper because you're not going to be doing a two-step method this is a single step method so what you're going to do is you're going to place that if you look at it so I got a little almost like a round divot you're going to place that crimp tube in it and what you're going to do is you're going to really carefully look to make sure it is fully in that little round notch that is not sticking up out of it at all so that's really a key part to this and you're going to squeeze and you're not going to worry about squeezing too hard I know with a Tercel crimping plier you usually want to squeeze pretty hard so we just squeeze gently and now we're going to rotate it make sure it's still in that little little notch and squeeze and you see what's starting to happen is just starting to take shape and again squeeze I'm starting to look more like that little bead so see us coming to be a nice little round shape and it really is just patience and I think the key is to make sure you're using the right materials that's sterling silver gold filled and that you are making sure it's really within the plier and in that little round not because that's what's molding it you don't want it sticking up otherwise I'll end up with like a little flared edge but that is how you use these magical Preppers and thanks again to Sarah Euler because she reintroduced me to these and I love them we do have another question hi Janet okay great so Janet is asking can we share tips on knowing which size crimp bead or crimp tube to use for your project so I think the best advice I can give you is to check the product descriptions yes so on our website we've been we've really tried to research every single product which includes all of the crimp beads the crimp tubes and it will tell you what size wire is recommended to use with them and then a lot of other tips such as the plier and in the pliers we list which pliers to use with the crimp tubes so we've really tried to make everything as easy as possible but it's really a matter of those product descriptions so I think that's the best tip I can give is to double check all that make sure that your wire matches your crimp tube if you're using a heavier beading wire you're going to want at least a 2 by 2 a 2 by 2 is pretty standard if you're using a really thin beading wire you can go with a one by one so I think that's the biggest tip is making sure your beading wire matches your crimp bead or crimp tube even more so than your beads well and one thing I like to do is actually exactly what Julie has done is before I even start a project I have a crimp tube that I'm willing to sacrifice so that I can make a little loop and just double check it before you do all the work of stringing especially if you're doing some big multi strand piece or something before you do any of that take one of your crimp tubes and just double check it you know cuz I know sometimes for me my crimp tubes they all end up in a bag together so I have to kind of separate them out so I want to make sure that okay so this size is the right size that I want in case you've forgotten which it is or which skew it is or product or whatever so that's a great little thing it's just just double check before you even begin your project but yeah we do a great job of trying to help you guys out and figure out exactly which is the right size and if you're curious a great way to look is by looking at some of our strong projects and you can see the beading wire that we use and the size crimp tube so that can also kind of help you as a guide as well if you let's say wanted to make one of the bracelets like Julie had made here and let's say you already have crimp tubes at home what I would recommend is looking at the size that we provide and see if yours matches and you got a match so that's that's a great tip is you can look at a similar project even yeah even if you aren't making the exact project look at something very similar and be like oh you're doing Swarovski pearls they did Swarovski pearls this is what they use and that's a great tip to kind of give you a guide just a little little guideline as you as you work yeah alright so I think I'm done with my stringing one thing I do want to just point out real quick as we're talking about crimp tubes is a crimp tube variety pack is a great idea - yeah so I have a little variety pack here so technically where do they go where's my Sirhan's okay here I have three sizes of crimp tubes and I've got my plier which will crimp all three and I'm set that's all I need that's great I love that yeah I know these are one of your favorite they are so yeah so and please keep the questions coming or loving answering the questions I think we go back to cat really quick and she's gonna talk a little bit about pearl knotting has some tour that alright so I love to do pearl knotting so I've actually kind of started a piece here and I wanted to use a nice colorful blue cord against the white pearl so you could really see so pearl adding is just sort of adding little nuts in between a little pearl and this is often done with pearls or gemstones because what it does is it really just protects those pearls from kind of smashing up against each other this is a little different technique this is sort of an alternative to stringing so a really just great little thing to use with this so I'm using a Griffin silk here and what I love about Griffin silk is that it actually comes with this twisted wire needle attached to the end of the silk so you can actually see that it's actually right in there but on the off chance that let's say I didn't want to use all of this silk for my project so I ended up cutting it off and then I ended up cutting off the end with the wire needle we actually do sell flexible twisted wire beading needles and these that we use for a lot of different things and you're going to need some of these if you're doing some of our rapid looms where you're going to need that extra needle but what happens is they have these nice little eyes here and these are totally flexible it's a nice little piece of wire here so you can just slip the eye onto the end there it's very nice and then what happens is you can just sort of pull it and it'll kind of kink on to your little Griffin silk there so it becomes a nice little wire needle so just so a great little thing to add to and I love that the pack comes with 50 because they're so delicate and tiny and you can just keep keep reusing them actually which is really fun ok I'm going to show you really quickly how did you some pearl matting so I just finished a knot here so I have my twisted wire needle attached to my Griffin silk and I'm just gonna slip on my bead and pull it all the way down and the tool that I'm going to use and this is kind of why I wanted to show this to you guys today is to use these little bent nose tweezers now these are really nice they actually fit really nicely in the hand so what I'm going to do is just kind of do a little wrap and a little knot they're just an overhand knot just pulling all my Griffin silk all the way through but how the tweezers are going to come in is I'm gonna put them through that hole and grip right next to my pearl there so I have just the tip right there and all I'm gonna do is just pull my knot and get it nice and close and tight and then just sort of slip out my tweezers and then I'm just gonna kind of come over and just sort of push that knot down just so it sits right next to that pearl so that I have no slack in between my two knots there so my pearl is nice and secure so these are a great little tool again because they have such a teeny tiny little pincher there and they have that nice little or economic Fed knows they're so just some great little tweezers also these are just great to have on hand if you try to pull a knot through or anything like that so if anything ever gets stuck these are a great thing to have on your table and I think before you talk about anything else we have another question a station okay her question is what do you do if the hole of your bead or your pearl is not big enough so we actually have a bead reamer mm-hmm and you can use that on pearls and it helps to widen that hole I would not recommend using an awesome thing like a glass bead though it's really meant for pearls but you can definitely do that and it works really well you can widen it to the point where you can get your stringing material through it well and we do have different different sizes of fie dreamers as well so if you're just trying to open it just a little bit you know you can start there and then if you need it to be a little bit wider you can just keep sort of twisting it through it basically it looks like a little file Ted file and it just kind of goes right through you're the center of the bead and you just kind of move your hand unfortunately I didn't think to hold on I'm sorry we do have a video though yes we do a video and I know we'll provide the link to you guys below here so you can see that but that's okay that's a great little tool to have on hand as well just get a little a little file absolutely so do you want to talk about your punches or should I talk about my memory wire bracelets you know why don't you get started on the memory wire bracelet all right so this is a really fun project we always get a lot of really positive feedback I think people love memory wire bracelets Kat made this one here and you can see that it keeps its shape even when you bend it so that was a really pretty bracelet did she did using noodle beads and this assortment of beads right here and I pulled out a different assortment and I'm going to show you how to make a single loop one I was thinking you know what valentine's Day is coming up so I did a little pink purple with the little hearts and I want to talk to you about the tools you're going to use so memory wire requires memory wire cutters do not please please please do not use any other cutter than memory wire cutters memory wire I pulled out a tool you might be tempted to use this is azor on a maxi shear cutter it cuts up to 14 gauge wire it is quite heavy even this one will still be damaged with memory wire it is so strong and it needs to be strong to keep its shape so definitely use your memory wire cutters and this is what they look like and to make a single loop one I'm just going to separate the memory wire out a little bit and I'm going to cut it so that it overlaps by about an inch and I've just put it between the two blades and I'm gonna cut and it cuts it super easy and it does not create a ding I cannot tell you how many pliers how many cutters I have little holes in them now because I tried to cut it and it actually does create like a little hole in your plier it runs your pliers it is but thankfully there's a cutter form so if you like doing memory wire projects the memory wire rate tool I also want to show you a really nice round nose plier now this is a Linstrom plier and this is one of cat's personal favorites I pulled it off of her desk and I wanted to show this one because of that nice fine tip so this is another really essential tool we have a quite a variety of round nose pliers to choose from on our website but it's a really nice tool for making loops and we had had that question earlier about the snowflakes and the wire forms and the way you would end one of those wire forms after one of those um if you're not familiar with our snowflakes they're basically like criss-crossing straight wires six of them and they're soldered in the middle and then you put beads on all the different arms and then at the end you need a way to finish it and a great way to finish it is by doing this creating a little loop so you just put the wire between the noses of the round nose plier and you Bend and it creates a little loop and it will prevent your beads from sliding off now if your loop ends up a little bit sideways you can still go ahead and use your normal chain nose pliers to just straighten that up a little bit and now that is my bee stopper and so I'm gonna recreate this bracelet here and show you how to finish it and just start stringing some random beads from this really pretty assortment and while Julie is doing a little bit of strain there we have a question okay alright so my question is how is memory wire different from craft wire and does it come in different sizes and by different sizes I think II mean gauges perhaps but the cool thing about memory wire is that it actually does come in different sizes now Julie is wearing the bracelet that I made there which is wonderful and it actually can kind of expand and contract so what's nice is it doesn't need to be a certain size now we do have a memory wire that is a circle and we do have a memory wire that is an oval we also have memory wire that is for necklace size so if you're looking to make something or actually it's it's also really great if you want to create a component so what you can do is you can take like a half a loop and now you've created a little Crescent so you can do wire wrapping or stringing on that and just sort of create your own little component and it'll really keep its shape the difference with craft wire is that it usually has a copper core which can make it a little bit more bendable which is great to work with so you can use softer tools with it but you can only work harden it so much memory wire is going to be a lot harder from the beginning and it'll keep its shape craft wire can get kinked I mean even after you've worked hardened it sometimes you can kind of crumple it with your hand depending on the gauge that you're using now craft wire does offer you different gages you can do sixteen fourteen eighteen all the way up to thirty thirty-two which is really really fine so there's a lot of different options for that but memory wire is a really different wire in my opinion than a craft wire and it does have a lot of different applications yeah I think if you are wanting to make a bracelet such as this that you want that nice round loop I would I would stick with the memory wire it really does retain its shape that's I think its main property is it's really meant to retain its shape and that's why it's so hard to cut that's why you need a special cutter for it because it's not meant to be easily like bent out of shape right you know it's meant to be pretty strong and pretty solid and you see I'm just putting all these beads on it and my loop is staying intact it's a nice solid round shape and it is one size fits all which is nice because it really does expand and we do have a couple projects showing you how to make a member wire cuff so that is also I think that was one of our best projects from this last year so you can definitely check it out in that product collection on our website but what's the great thing about that is that it still holds its shape even though you've now cut it apart and made it tough right so again you can kind of get the different sizes from there but it really the loops are I want to say they are 2.5 inches yes if I'm being correct I hope I am but they do expand like as you can see Julie's wearing my bracelet there but if she were to push it up a little bit higher on her wrist it would just simply expand yeah it wouldn't necessarily become you know it just sort of becomes a different size right if you if you were a little bit larger or what-have-you so but the ovals are actually a really great thing because then they lay a little flatter but those have a little different style as well we do you have some projects using that and I know we have a lot of people who make and sell jewelry and memory wire bracelets are great because you'd have to worry about sizing absolutely so if you are making some jewelry to give us a gift or you're selling it is a really nice relief to not worry about sizing I know so that's kind of a fun thing about it too so I'm almost done and we do have another question as I'm putting on my last few beads okay do you have any tips or for keeping memory wire and other findings from tarnishing biggest tip is put them in a ziploc bag I actually have tarnish resistant yeah oh yeah great idea and tarnish resistant strips yep so those are three different things you can do so I I would put them in a ziploc bag when you're not using him whether it's a regular Ziploc or tarnish resistant I put the little tarnish resistant pad in it and then the other tip is if you are having a lot of tarnishing happening with your own personal jewelry just look at your habits are you showering with it are you putting on perfume after you put on your necklace and do you have lotion yeah so those things can help to accelerate the tarnish process especially I know this is something that we all think about but clean your jewelry every every once in a while you know I mean I I wish I could do it every time I check out my pair of earrings I just sometimes I don't think about it but every once in a while like when you go to clean your makeup brushes clean your jewelry to just just wipe them off you know there's lots of alcohol that you can use depending on the the metal finish of course but you know just just clean up your jewelry and make sure it's all pretty and nicely packaged yeah so so I hope that helped give you some ideas of where to start so I'm ready to finish my bracelet all right so you see that did not take long and I love this variety pack because fun to just have an assortment of beads so I've got just a little bit left here it's a little over a quarter of an inch and I'm just going to take my round nose plier again and it's nice because I can make this loop any size I want I think this is about where I had the other loop and I'm just working it around and there we go we've got my loop and now what I'm gonna do because I did want to show you a very basic skill here which is good for everything is just opening a jump ring so I've got my chain nose and I think I'm gonna use my neurons just keep coming in handy cuz these are the foreign ones so I'm going to take one of these little heart charms that comes with an oval jump ring attached to it I'm just gonna open that jump ring slide it on to my loop and close it on up you can do that on the other side as well I love these little like puff heart charms okay I don't put this on the other side as well and you see how these work together so that's a nice thing is because often times you do need that second chain nose pliers so if you don't want to have two identical tools it's nice to have this for one and we're done we made a little second memory wire bracelet no it's so amazing yeah very easy so I think cat is gonna now show us another tool I know we're trying to move along here because yeah I've been talking for a while but we definitely show you all these fun tools so I'm gonna show you this really quickly we do have videos on how to use the macrame boards but I just kind of wanted to show you the size difference between the mini macrame board and the large one here and there was a large one here is what you're going to get making away today but the mini one is I'll just kind of turn down that side so you can really see that it's about half the size so the great thing about this guy here is that it's great for travel because it actually holds your cords in place so I started this little bracelet here now this is just a very simple square knot using some hemp cord and I wanted to add just little beads on the side there so just very very simple but what's nice is that it has this nice little ruler that goes across and down and what's also great is that it holds your cords in place so that if you ever need to put it down you can just pick it up so you don't have to worry about it getting all knotted and everything like that so kind of keeps it all nice and in place for you so we do have videos showing you how to do this but I just want to show this is a really great little tool and I like that it's nice and lightweight you can use it for many different applications and it's great to travel with so if you want to just do a little macrame or whatever as you are on the plane or in a car is a great little tool alright so the last thing that I have to show here is I'm going to show a couple little hole punchers now this you're going to want to use with some metal hole punchers here now I have the round 1.25 millimeters we do have a couple of other different sizes and this is the Europe hunch but I wanted to pull these ones out today so that I could show you a really neat little trick so one of the things that can happen is if you take a piece like this and you want to use it and just hole punch what can happen is you can actually end up marring this little piece just a little bit so what I recommend is actually placing a little piece of paper towel over it so that when you line up your hole punch and you can kind of gauge it on the back there so let's say I want a hole punch right there towards the corner I'm just going to put right through that paper towel and now I won't have that nice little or that nasty little mark on it so I have a nice little clean hole right on the front there so when you're choosing the size that you want to use I would definitely recommend looking to maybe the size jump ring that you want to use you might need something that has a larger hole and then I just want to kind of use my same little piece here and show you this little guy now this is great if you're trying to drill rivet holes and what's nice is that you can see on the top here let me kind of turn them around I hope you can see this on camera we have the 1.5 millimeter and the 2 millimeter now these are great you just kind of set your piece in there and I'm not really gonna focus too much on where it's gonna be here make sure I'm going the right way there we go alright so I'm just gonna get it down there and then punch my little hole and then I'm just gonna undo it there and I have my nice little hole so really super simple again we do have another video I I'm rushing a little bit because I want to try to get this wrapped up for us today but some great little hole punch tools as well so you'll find these in our product collection for today and I do want to note with this one what surprises me is you don't have to use a lot of strength no it looks like I do but this like crankshaft really does the work for you and it's very easy to do and then one tip I wanted to share is if you do know specifically where you want your hole take a little fine tip permanent marker yes and make a little dot and you'll be able to see that when you're lining it up and you're just gonna punch right over that dot so you're not going to worry about ink on there on your piece but it's a great little tip yeah and then we did a question hi Angie oh do you know how to pop when the hole is complete I think you do you kind of notice like a little give yeah you can you can kind of feel and it's like tight and then it goes yeah then you're like oh there you go yeah very easy though super super easy yeah and then I think I'm gonna grab your tray here I'm sort of sharing so I want to show you another tool that you often we're not often but you might want to use in conjunction with some blanks so we have a lot of swarovski flatbacks crystals we have some that are hotfix and some that are not hotfix and these ones here are not hot fixing so they're really pretty now this is a magic pick because I'm often like well how do you get that here let's say we wanted to do a little design I would recommend using again your G's hypo cement and you could place little dots and then to pick up your little flat backs we have this tool right here and this says right on it magical pick and you see it has this nice little kind of tacky tip to it and what you're going to do is you're just going to place it on top of your stone and it picks it up you can move it around and then once you've got your glue dot it will just stick in the glue and release and you can do that time and time again and then if you want to adjust the position you've got this nice pointed tip end and you can just scoot them so this is a super handy tool if you like using these flat backs and then if you use this time and again and this kind of loses its tackiness it comes with this great little like recharge your pad so you just put a little bit of scotch tape in and you just clean it you roll it on there and press it down a few times and it returns that stick to it and then you're just able to pick up these pretty little flat backs and QS it with all different sizes of flat box you can also use it with tongs as well oh you can use it with Shakhtar's working with crystal clay mhm this is a great little tool yeah so this is one of our staples in the design space it really it's kind of a mystery how do you get those guys onto here you could try to easer I was gonna say go ahead and try the tweezer go for it Julie alright well I've done this before alright fine okay I was pretty sure they'll be flying across the room before it like and then I'm out of flat back yeah this is definitely I think the preferred method you know I think it gives you a little bit more ability and where you're putting it as opposed to trying to tweezer it around so another nice thing is if you do have any shaking this to your hand a chaser can be difficult this you know even if your hand is a little bit shaky this is gonna be really forgiving and that's gonna be nice to be able to pick those up yes absolutely alright so we are down to one last tool but before we show that to you we want to review the giveaway so you have one last chance to leave some comments to enter our giveaway and so we are got the large macrame board we have the bead Stoppers the thread zap and this complete tool kit and all you need to do is leave a comment alright so last chance leave your comment really quick while Julie shows us our last little tip and trick and with our last little tool here so go ahead alright essentially I have tool magic so this is a really cool substance and I'm counting this as a tool because we use it with tools so this is essentially a paint or coating that you put on the tips of your pliers to prevent them from marring your wire so if you do a lot of wire work this is great so I've already pre coded one and I know you can't feel this because you're watching this but it's a little bit rubbery it's not tacky it's smooth it's dried and it's a little bit rubbery and that is going to help to prevent little Mars and nicks on your wire as you're working with if you're tugging your wire maybe you're doing chainmail this would be great for chainmail because actually gonna give you a little bit more grip to it's a little not sticky and I wants a sticky but it's like a little bit of rubber yeah so it does give you that I want to show you how to use this so if you look inside this let me set up a little bit of a bill station just in case because you never know alright so if you open this up this is what it looks like inside it looks like white paint or white glue and I'm gonna take my sarong Shana's and you're gonna stir it up and all you need to do submerge the tips and pull them out and you see now they're coated and I let mine dry overnight just to be on the safe side I don't think you actually need to let it dry that long please check the product description I don't think it's overnight I had prepped mine for this class by letting it dry overnight but that's it so I like to kind of hold him for a few minutes as it's super wet and then what I do is I just put the lid back on oh and you don't do that you don't squeeze them together after you've done that but you see it's actually already starting to dry so that's like a good note of how good little tests there Julian test absolutely absolutely okay what I would normally do is not squeeze them together and keep them open and just set them on something to dry yes so that's what you do and do not spit right after you do that but we do have another question so okay it's tool magic latex and I almost just squeeze these guys again let me check the description yeah we do want to let you guys know if you do have a question about what material something isn't it is not listed please let us know because when we definitely want to help you out and two we want to make sure that it is listed so that the next person you know I will be able to find out exactly what's what's in the some of the products that we sell so we definitely want to help you guys out so if you ever have a question or if it's not listed just asked yeah and please go ahead Angie and we will research that for you I am not seeing it on the actual jar so I think that is a very important question to answer so we will answer that question for you and get back to you to your comments but we just need to do a little bit of research it might be on the actual physical packaging like a card that this comes with so we'll check that out for you in let you know yes mm-hmm all right we are just about ready to announce our giveaway winner so thank you so much for joining us we hope we gave you some ideas or introduced you to some new tools that you might not have known about keep leaving comments we do continue to check them for the next several days even weeks we check back and always reach out to us with other questions and thank you again and a Happy New Year let's see who our is alright so our winner is Sandra Morgan Ellis congratulations so we will be go ahead and send us a note you at service at beadaholique and beadaholique.com just a message at service at beadaholique.com and we'll get your information so that we can send out this beautiful giveaway to you congratulations thank you so much for joining us everybody and I'm so sorry about my coughs I feel really terrible but I'm feeling better so we'll be back next week and we'll have lots of great new things for you guys and we'll be doing another class in February so stay tuned yeah and please join us again next Wednesday because we do beat table Wednesday every Wednesday where you can check in with us and again that's a really great time to talk to us and see what worked - all right happy new year everyone thanks for joining us
Related Videos
Beadaholique Live Class: Austrian Crystal Fancy Stones and Settings
In this special live event, designers Kat and Julie show you their tips and tricks for using Austrian crystal Fancy Stones and Settings in your jew...
View full details
Beadaholique Live Class: Santa's Workshop
In this special live class event, designers, Kat Silvia and Julie Bean, get to work like little elves to create 30 pieces of quick and easy jewelry...
View full details
Beadaholique Live Class: Gifts and Kits for Beaders
In this Beadaholique Live Class Event, join designers Kat Silvia and Julie Bean to learn all about great jewelry kits and gift ideas for beaders. W...
View full detailsYou recently viewed
Clear recently viewed1 second ago
Beadaholique Live Class: Must-Have Tools for the Designer
In this special live event, designers Kat Silvia and Julie Bean share their favorite tools for jewelry making. See some old favorites and even som...
View full details