How to Make an Adjustable Filigree Ring

SKU VID-0260
Designer: Julie Bean
Learn how to make an adjustable filigree ring using just 4 ingredients: 26 gauge wire, focal point such as a pearl or crystal, bead cap, and filigree piece. The only tools required are a ring mandrel and wire cutter.
Audio Transcript
Note: This audio transcript is auto-generated and may not be completely accurate.
Welcome to Beadaholique.com. This is Julie and today I'm going to be showing you how to make an adjustable filigree ring. You can see here that I've sized it to my finger. We've attached without using glue. We've used wire here and lovely Swarovski Rivoli We're only are going to use a few simple ingredients to make this project. We've got a piece of filigree, a bead cap, we have a lovely Swarovski Rivoli, and we have six inches of twenty six gauge wire. The tools you're going to need are a pair of flush cutters, a ring mandrel and if you happen to have a pair of bail making pliers. These come in handy too but they're not absolutely needed. So to start off you will need to measure your ring finger. To do that you're going to need a ring sizing kit or you can go to your local jewelry store and have your ring size there for you for free. So to size your finger if you happen to have a kit at home you're going to take a ring. This one says five. There's numbers of all sizes. The average size of a ring if you're making it for sale is six to seven. I know mines is actually a little bit smaller than that. I put the five on my finger. It's actually a little bit loose. That ring is going to slide off. Go down a size to four-and-a-half. That feels just about right. That ring won't go anywhere. So I know that is my ring size. I know it's a little bit small compared to the average so again if you are going to be making them for sale go ahead and probably size it to about seven and then this ring is adjustable so your customer can go ahead and size it accordingly. So what you do is you take the size of the ring that fit on your finger and you find that on your ring mandrel. Now mine is a four so I would actually lay my piece of filigree right here with the four being in the middle. So what I want to do is I want to do this more for an average person which is gonna be make it six or seven. So I'll call it six-and-a-half. Now what you can do at this point is you can just take your filigree and press it around the ring mandrel. Now here's a tip I want to show you if you happen to have a pair of bail making pliers at home take the bail making pliers and at the tip of filigree just gently ease them up. It's almost like your walking up your filigree. And this is just pre-bending your filigree a little bit. Just helps your fingers so that they don't have to use too much pressure or strength to push around the mandrel. That's all I'm going to do. I'm going back now to my mandrel. Going to line it up with that six-and-a-half mark because that's what I decided I wanted to do. I'm just going to squeeze. This is where it gets a little bit tricky. You can tell that one end is sticking up quite a bit and this here is where I'm going to take my bail making pliers and ease it along. Try not to use too much pressure. You can see this is adjustable. So if a person has a lot of wider finger is going to be able to go ahead and pull it out. A person with a narrower of finger is going to be able to squeeze in and it'll fit right on the finger. I did another one with a different kind of filigree so you can see how they look. Lots of pretty of designs available for your choosing. You can pick which ever you like. Now if you're going to go ahead and make a ring like we're doing today that's going to have something attached with wire to it. You're going to make sure that it has holes in the center. This piece does as well. There are some pieces out there that don't. We've gone ahead and shaped my ring so that's step one. I already pre cut my six inches the wire but you just go ahead and cut six inches of twenty six gauge wire. Take that and what you're going to do is first take your stone place it into your bead cap push it down and we're just gonna take our fingers and push the tip of the bead cap each petal over the stone. So that's now secure and you've made a setting. You can hopefully see is that there's a little bit of a gap at the bottom. That's what we're going to eventually thread our wire through. To begin we're going to take our wire, fold it in half. Not going to completely crimp it but we're going to have a nice little arch at the end. What we want is when we're wearing our ring we don't want any wires poking at her fingers. So what I'm going to do I'm going to take my wire poke it through one hole there. It's a little bit tricky to see. Put one wire through and hold it. So now I've got both wires coming through. I just want to make sure that when I pull this it doesn't kink and pull that through. I'm going to flatten it there so it lays flush against what will be where my fingers are going to go. Now I'm going to twist one full twist. Now I have the two wires sticking out and I'm going to take one, thread it through your stone setting Bring that up top and I'm going to take the other one thread it in the opposite direction. Sometimes it's a little hard to shove it through. Just got it be persistent. Essentially what you're doing is you are anchoring your stone to your setting. You can tell I kind of tugged on it a little bit. And I have two wires poking out. Now you can do one of two things if you feel like your stone needs a little bit more stability you can go ahead and thread your wire through an open work hole in the filigree and have it come back out the top of another hole. You can do that on the opposite side as well just thread it down pull it through and pull it through again up top. That's the beauty of filigree, there are lots of available holes for you to pull through and when you're happy I want you to take your wire hold one down flat and I want you to circle it around the base of the bead cap setting. Just push into place. You're hiding that wire and you take your other one and go in the opposite direction. If you need to you can very carefully take our flush cutters and snip off any edge which is protruding outward. And there you go you have a lovely adjustable filigree ring which we made without using any glue. Go to Beadaholique.com for all of your beading supplies needs!

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