How to Make a Wire Glass Drop Bead Bracelet

SKU VID-0259
Designer: Julie Bean
Learn how to make a beautiful bracelet using glass drop beads and wire. The result is a very sleek and complicated looking wire wrapped bracelet, but as you will learn in this video, it is very easy to do and very quick.
Audio Transcript
Note: This audio transcript is auto-generated and may not be completely accurate.
Hi. This is Julie with Beadaholique.com and today one she had to make this glass teardrop bracelet with wire wrapping in between the teardrops. It's fastened with a little lobster clasp and in this one I choose to use two different colors of the glass teardrops. It looks complicated but as you're about to see in this video. It's really quite easy to do and when you're gonna love making these. The ingredients you're going to need is a lobster clasp, an eight-millimeter open jump ring, a four millimeter open jump ring and two different colors of czech glass tear drop beads. These are eight-millimeter size. You can make them longer if you want. And then you're gonna need twenty-two gauge craft wire and twenty-six gauge craft wire. If you want to use sterling or gold filled or anything like that you can definitely do that as well. I choose to use craft wire for this project. The tools you're going to need is a pair of looping pliers. You can see that there's a concave side and then a round nose part of of this plier. If you have a round nose plier that would do is well. We're going to be making wrapped wire loops with these. I just prefer the looping pliers. You're going to need a flat nose chain pliers and a flush cutter. So that is all you're going to need for this project. To begin I want you to take your twenty-two gauge craft wire and this is a bracelet so we need it to be at least as long as our wrist is and then some. So I'm going to eyeball this because you can always cut more off later. I'm going to cut about ten inches or so. Actually this kind of kinked at one end and I don't really want that so I'm going to cut off one end to have a little bit smoother wire to work with. I'm going to straighten out my wire with my fingers and I'm going to take my looping pliers and about an inch from one end just going to make a loop and I'm going to make a wrapped wire loop. What's really nice about the looping pliers is it holds it in place for you as you're doing this. There you go. I'm just going to cut off the access now with my cutters. Going to take my flat nose chain nose and I'm just going to push that rough wire edge in a little bit so I don't have a rough edge. Okay this is the start of a bracelet. Now there's a trick to this bracelet. wWhen you often see wire wrapping you're usually wrapping the beads onto it a thicker wire using a thinner wire and that is what this bracelet is going to look like but we're going to do a little cheat here. We are just going to actually thread the teardrop beads directly onto our twenty-two gauge wire. I'm going to do this where I put every other bead in a different color. So I'm going to start with my teal then I'm going to put my blue and another teal and another blue. I want to show how this is going to look like. So when these get squished down towards the very end you can see that you can actually create nice rows by doing alternating beads. So I'm just going to do that for what's going to be about six-and-a-half inches of a link. I'v estrange all my beads and I've gone ahead and I've checked to make sure that i didn't misstep and accidentally did two of same color in a row. I actually stopped at about six inches because I know my wrists is on the narrow side and six inches came out to be about twenty beads on each side. Twenty of the teal and twenty of the blue. You notice that I started with a teal so I wanted to stop with the blue. Now I'm going to hold them like this because I want to make sure that it's really nice and tight. It's going to create a good structure to our bracelet. So now I'm going to go ahead and take my looping pliers again and right here right where the bead is and this is tight again I'm going to put the tip of the edge of the looping pliers, I'm going to make a loop and I'm going to wrap it again. Release my pliers. Cut off the excess wire and go ahead and push my rough edge in. So we actually do have a very nice structure to our bracelet look at this point. If you wanted to you could actually stop right now but I want to make it look like I went through a lot more work than I actually did to create this bracelet and I wanna make it look like I wire wrapped it. So to do that I'm going to take my twenty-six gauge craft wire. I'm going to pull off of here about eighteen twenty inches. You always want to have a little bit more than less so I might even do twenty two twenty four inches. That's kind of a nice thing about using craft wire. Its pretty inexpensive so I you don't to worry about putting an extra inch or two onto your length. I'm going to straighten out with my fingers my wire again trying to get some of that curve out of there. I'm going to start on one end. I'm going to hold the craft wire up against my finger between the loop and my finger down at the base where I did my wrapping. I'm going to just make a couple quick tight wraps to secure y twenty-six gauge wire to make twenty two gauge wire. About three should suffice. Okay now you're going to love this part. This is how we're gonna make it look a lot more complicated of a bracelet. So my craft wire is sticking out from the back so I'm actually behind the bead. This first bead is pointing downward. I'm going to pull the wire into the crack between the two beads in the crevice. Then I'm going to go and pulling it under so it's coming behind the teal bead which is pointing upwards pull it around and I'm gonna put back down the other crack. So you can tell what I've done is I've gone down and then backwards and up and then this way. Now I'm going to do that pull this behind this bead so I actually have like a little bit of a double wrap right there. Now I'm gonna pull instead of going back down to that crack I just went through I'm going to go through the crack here. I'm going to pull it back down. Go behind the teal bead and back a round the side of the blue teardrop. So basically you're just following the natural path of where the two beads are meeting each other. Down pull it back come back to the front and down again. Once you get the hang of it you're going to be able to do this pretty quick. So we've got to the very end so now it looks like in between all of our beads it looks like they've been wrapped together. Now at the end where we're meeting our wrapped wire loop. You can tell I just came out of the end here. I'm going to pull it back around and I'm just gonna go over my other loopings about three times to keep that secure. Now I'm just going to snip off the end. I want to just tuck in that little rough edge. Now want to go back, I actually forgot I've have this little rough edge so I'm just going to snip it off. That's tucked in. We've got our bracelet form. Going to try it on your wrist to make sure it fits. That's going to be perfect for my clasp. Kind of shape it. This is wire so it bends kind of shape it in a circle shape. Now what we want to do is going to attach the clasp. To start with we are going to open a jump ring. This is our eight-millimeter one and now I did pull in a pair of bent nose pliers. If you did use a pair of round nose pliers you can use them in place or another pair of chain nose or whatever you normally used to open up a jump ring. I'm going to put this one through the wrap wire loop on one edge and close it backup. Same thing on the other side but I'm going to use a four millimeter jump ring so it's a little bit more discreet and I'm gonna go ahead and attach my clasp to it as well close that back up. So you know have a completed bracelet and just go ahead open the clasp. Attach it to a large eight-millimeter jump ring and there you go. You know what I think I actually be a lot of fun is if you're doing two different colors of beads you actually get enough beads when you buy them from Beadaholique.com to make two bracelets. If you buy two packs of the teardrop glass beads you get fifty beads each which is going to give you a hundred beads which is going to be enough to make two bracelets and I think it actually really fun to double these. So go ahead and make two bracelets three or even four and wear them all on your wrist at the same time. I think that would be a really fun look. And there you go. That's how you do it. If wanna make one, two, three or four of these fun glass teardrop bracelets Go to Beadaholique.com for all of your beading supplies needs!

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