How to Stretch Silk Cord for Use in Jewelry Making

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Note: This audio transcript is auto-generated and may not be completely accurate.
Hi this Megan with Beadaholique.com. I'm going to show you how to stretch out silk cord and before you use silk cord in a project you do need to stretch it or else your project might loose tension and loose its shape as the cord stretches naturally. It also will help get the kinks out of the cord if you're going to use it in a way that lets the cord hang naturally. You open it up. I'm using griffin silk for this and the way that the griffin silk comes is with this little built in needle. You can see that when you let it go it's got kinks in. So it will straighten out the cord and it will also stretch it out so that it's ready to be used. What you'll need to use is a hanger. Just a regular clothes hanger and some water and something to weight the thread. Weight the cord down. So I'm going to use a butter knife. The ones I have are kind of flimsy so I'm going to go ahead two just give it a good solid weight but anything that you have that you think hang there overnight would work. So what we need to do it is and get the silk cord wet. Just stick it in water. Kind of ring it out a little bit. Make sure it is saturated but it doesn't need to be dripping. Then take the end and tie it onto a butter knife or something else you want to use to weigh it down. And the very tip here is not going to get stretched out so just be aware that whatever it is that you're tying around the weight that won't be what you want to use later when you're done with it. You'll just want to cut it off. Tie it security so that what you're using to weigh it down doesn't slip out. It's going to be hanging there for a while. Go ahead and tie the other end of your cord onto your hanger. Once again you're not going to able to use this piece so you're not going to able to use the little built-in needle. You can just go ahead and use any other big eye needle just as easily though. Once you have that tied up, just hang your hanger over the edge of a door or a hook or even up in a closet. The only thing you want to keep in mind is that whatever you're using to weigh it down doesn't touch the floor and you can leave it overnight to dry all the way through so that that the weigh weill gradually pull the wet silk and as it dries it will get nice and stretched out. So when you come back to your silk string in the morning after it's hung overnight. You see it's all nice and dry. You take the tension out you'll see that all the kinks are gone. And also it will be hanging lowered than it was so make sure that you do leave yourself enough room that you hang it high enough that you leave yourself enough room for it to stretch. so it won't be touching the ground and what you'll do is just snip it off at the ends where it's tied on. and then your length that you have left is all stretched out and nice and smooth and ready to use. Go to Beadaholique.com for all of your beading supply needs!