How to Make a Braided Soft Flex Charm Earring by Sara Oehler

	Soft Flex, Extreme Flex 19 Strand Medium Beading Wire .019 Inch, Silver Plated (30 Feet) SKU: XCR-5293 $25.99
	TierraCast Pewter Charms, Dagger Drop Design 17x6mm Rhodium Plated (2 Pieces) SKU: PND-176 $2.89
	TierraCast Pewter Frame Pendant, Flame Design with Crystal 19x9.5mm, 22K Gold Plated (1 Piece) SKU: PND-177 $4.89
	The Beadsmith Crimp Beads, Tube 2x2mm, Silver Plated (100 Pieces) SKU: FCR-1715 $1.99
	Crimp Bead Covers, 3mm, Silver Plated (50 Pieces) SKU: FCR-1093 $5.99
	Earring Findings, Long Elegant Hooks 25mm, Silver Plated (25 Pairs) SKU: FEA-3025 $8.29
	Magical Crimping Pliers, Transforms 2mm Tubes Into Round Beads (1 Pc) SKU: XTL-5272 $26.99
	Standard Size Beading Crimping Pliers (For 2x2mm & 2x1mm Crimp Beads) SKU: XTL-5200 $14.49

Note: This audio transcript is auto-generated and may not be completely accurate.
hello my name is Sarah eller and I'm the sales and marketing manager for soft flex company today I'm going to show you how to make a fantastic pair of earrings here in the beadaholique design studio and I am so excited to be here and get to share with you a design that I created recently using some of the new to your cast parts and pieces from their 2017 collection that beadaholique carries alongside our extreme trio the extreme trio is comes in three different colors it comes in our champagne our sterling silver and our 24 karat gold what's really awesome about this particular product is it is a copper alloy base each one has one by 19 strands of copper alloy wire and the 24 karat gold is plated in a true real 24 karat gold with a clear nylon coating and that's how we're able to get that real beautiful color of gold in our wire likewise the sterling silver is plated in a real 925 sterling silver so it gives you just a beautiful brilliant bright silver these are coated in a clear nylon which makes them hypoallergenic and also also non tarnishing and then the champagne the third in the trio is just the basic copper alloy with no plating with a clear nylon coating we when we first saw this color before we were doing the plating in the research and development of this product line we just fell in love with it it's just sort of a beautiful sort of neutral color that just pairs so nicely with the silver or the gold and they all work together really well so in this particular design I used all three colors of extreme the champagne the 925 and the 24 karat braided together in one solid piece so to get started on this project I'm unroll a little bit of wire from each of these three spools I need about three and a half inches of braided wires so I'm just going to open these up they're really easy to open there's just a nice little clip that can hold them in plate holds the wire in place on the spool just open it up and I am going to take all three wires and simply hold them together for about an inch to an inch and a half from the end using a bead stopper if you've never seen one of these it's like a coil that just closes down on top of the wire it's great so it doesn't Mar or hurt the wire in any way shape or form but it'll hold everything together and it's great if you're doing something like braiding another great way to do this project if anytime you're braiding is to use a macrame board if you have one handy but this is a nice way if you're on the go and you need to do some braiding just clip it with the speed stopper and then you can pretty easily braid the wire just by taking the left over the middle as in the right over the middle it's just like braiding hair not any different and as you keep going you'll build just a really beautiful braid with your sauce blacks so I went ahead and completed the braid so that we could keep moving forward on this project so I'm just going to clip this off real fast and pull in the fully braided piece so like I said this is a three and a half inches of braided wire the wire itself is going to be a little bit longer than that probably about six inch pieces is what I would start with or you can do it right off the spool which I often do because that's a great way to make sure you're not wasting any extra wire so what I'm going to do next is I'm going to go ahead and remove one of these bead Stoppers I'm going to take all three strands of the extreme wire and I'm going to string my two by two millimeter crimp tube and it is a tight fit to get three strands of oh one nine medium wire through two by two crimp tube but it totally does that I'm going to pull that crimp tube down to my braid and you may see a little bit of this jagged edge coming out all you need to do is pull on the wire that's kind of sticking out till you can get a nice tight fit right up to that braid next I'm going to take my magical crimping pliers these truly are magical they are appear one of my favorite pairs of pliers they have a little knot on each side that's identical and when these two sites come together it creates sort of a dome and that dome fits the 2x2 crimp tube just perfectly so you want to get the crimp tube just really centered inside that plier and compress if you've done it correctly you'll see four little corners like a little square in your crimp tube it just pinches a little corner on each side you're going to come in the opposite direction now you're going to pinch those four corners down again you want to Center your crimp as best as you can and then I like to go around it five or six times just gently compressing what you're doing is compressing the two ends of the crimp tube into the nylon coating of the wire and it also makes it into this beautiful little round bead that's going to be lovely for our designs so I'm going to do the same thing on the other side I'm going to take all three wires string my two by two crimp tube and pull it down to braiding and again just kind of work with it until you can get it as far down that braided surface as possible if you want to do a little measurement you can always do that to make sure that you're getting the same size that way your next earring is going to be a similar size and kind of keep messing with it until you get it just right and then you're just going to use that same plier again find the center compress turn it on its side compress compress compress and now to put it all together we're going to clip two of the wires on each side so I'm going to clip right up next to that Crip tube when you're using a flush cutter you use the flat side of the cutter to get as close as possible to the crimp tube so I have just one wire coming out of my crimp and I like to clip one wire at a time just to be really careful and also just to get that nice clean clothes cut so that someday when somebody looks at it they'll say hey where did that wire even connect ok so lost for the crimping we're going to take both ends we're going to string one wire through our two by two crimp tube in one direction and then we're going to string the other wire through two by two crimp tube in the opposite direction and we're going to pull that down so it's nice and tight between the two crimps on either side and then we're going to crimp it again same magical crimper so you can also use regular crimpers if you really wanted to for this one because we're going to cover the middle one with a crimp cover again you don't have to use a crimp cover I like it because it's three crimps in a line and I think the three millimeter crimp cover is really nice in the center you can kind of see it here on the finish design I'm going to get in a nice close cut I've got my nice round circle and I'm just going to do my very last bit which is a three millimeter crimp cover I like to use the rounder and the regular crimping pliers for crimp covers the biggest trick with crimp covers is to go slowly they tend to sort of turn if you're not compressing right in the center of that crimp cover so if you've never seen a crimp cover before it's like an open-faced bead it'll slip right over the top of my crimp and I'm just going to gently compress and if you go slow and you see it turning you can come back in and straighten it out I like to tuck my crimp covers so I'm coming in on one side of the seam to tuck one side down and then I'm going to come over the top on the other side of the seam to tuck the other side down and that will give me a nice solid print cover that's not going to slip or slide around it'll stay put which is so important and then the last step here is we are just going to add an ear wire and then we're going to add a charm hanging from it so we used the silver in this case so I'm going to use the silver the silver dagger from tierracast again you can use chain nose pliers to open an ear wire but I also sometimes just use my crimping pliers because they're always handy because I'm crimping so I just use the very flat tip open up your ear wire to the side rather than out so you don't ruin that beautiful round circle I'm going to slip the softflex braid on to beat ear wire and then we'll flip our charm on to the ear wire as well and I might do it the other way around because the terms kind of big there we go and then I'm just going to close that back up and then we have got a beautiful soft flex earring with our round circle that's braided you can do this in gold as well you could also use the antique brass with some of the new tier cast pieces that came out I hope that you enjoyed this project today and that you learned a lot about crimping and braiding and about our extreme flex beading wire and definitely can pick up all of these products from beadaholique.com thank you you