Jewelry Basics for Beginners: Part 2 (Earrings, Necklace Ideas)

For the second part to my "jewelry basics" post, I'll be sharing a few ideas for putting earrings and necklaces together, as well as showing you a few pictures of some other jewelry ideas to help you in your inspiration (as well as where I get some of my inspiration from). I'll also give some ideas for helping your jewelry-making to  be "budget friendly."

Earrings

Probably the easiest - yet most time-consuming for me - part of jewelry-making involves creating a pair of earrings. Once I decide on how the earrings will look, I can literally throw together a pair of earrings in about five minutes. However, deciding how they'll look can take me forever. Just ask my husband. This pair of earrings that I'm showing you how to make took us a good 15 minutes just to decide on what beads to use - yes, us. I made him look at every possible combination of beads to see if it "looked right." And that can be hard - you don't want the earrings to be out of proportion with your necklace. If you are making a large, "chunky" sort of necklace, you don't want to make a tiny little pair of drop earrings. On the other hand, neither do you want to make a huge, dangly pair of earrings for a simple necklace. So that's the hard part.
 
But for this post, I've done the work for you. Here are the beads that I finally chose to go with the necklace (that you'll see further on in this article), along with the "findings" used to make the earrings. 

As you can see from the "finished product" picture of the earrings (above), I chose to use this cranberry colored bead on the bottom, and the bronze one on top. Therefore, I "wired" the cranberry bead with a head pin and the bronze one with an eye pin. 

To attach the top-most bead to the earring, I simply opened up the "eye" on the bottom of the earring piece. 

Once it was opened, I was able to slide the bronze bead's eye, and then close the earring's eye back up with the round nose pliers. After that, I just attached the cranberry bead to the bronze one (connecting the "eyes" as shown in Part 1), and I was finished. Pretty simple, right? Yup, that's definitely the easy part. 

Finished pair of earrings

You wouldn't think it would be that hard to pick out two little beads, but with the large variety of beads I used in the necklace, it was just hard to decide. :-) 

Necklaces
For the necklace, I decided to use a 3-strand template I've sort of developed to make a fuller, slightly dressier necklace (yes, it's a borrowed idea). To start, I made a sort of pendant to hang down from the bottom - sometimes, I'll get a pre-made pendant , and sometimes I'll create one myself. This is one that I created, and then started working my way up on both sides, linking eye-wired beads.

Left: pendant created using beads varying in sizes, connected with eye pins; 

Right: laying out the beads before wiring them together

After going part way up the sides by linking these beads, I connected both of the ends to a special finding, typically used as part of a pull-through T-clasp. I used these because they were large enough to hold more than one layer of the strand.

The connector used to attach each of the 3 strands to

 For the middle of the 3 strands, I just used a piece of bronze chain that I got in a pack (for $1 at Walmart!). As you can tell by the price, this chain is rather cheap, so I try not to use it to hold any weight. 

Adding the second strand to the connectors

 I had a hard time figuring out what to do about the 3rd layer. Should I do another layer of chain with a few beads strung on? Should I do just beads? I started out doing a row of just beads. 

 However, it just didn't seem to look right when I held it up on myself - the strand just wasn't long enough. But that's the beauty of doing this yourself. You can always take something apart and start over. So I did ... of sorts. I simply added a little chain to the ends of the short bead strand. 

As you can probably tell, I also had to find a way to wrap this around my neck. I debated about using the bronze chain to hang the lower part of the necklace on (see bronze chain cheapness above). But I felt that if I did more beads linked all the way up, it would start to look to heavy/busy. So I compromised by using a double layer of the chain (hopefully that = double the strength) and wiring some beads to both ends. Once that was done, I attached the "clasp" (a pull-through T-clasp), sealed the jump rings with super glue, and voila! Necklace complete.

Displaying the finished product

Some other ideas
As I've mentioned, I like to "borrow" ideas from a variety of sources: catalogs, displays in stores, stuff people wear. And thanks to modern technology, I can usually snap a quick photo on my phone whenever I need to. Here are a few of my other "creations," some using borrowed ideas.

My own "earthy" necklace

The necklace above also incorporates the "3-strand" method. However, instead of using chain and links, I did most of this using some leather cording. I threaded that through most of the beads and just tied knots to keep the beads from sliding around. 

Close-up of the connector

Here is a zoomed-in shot of what I used to connect the 3 strands. You can find a lot of these "connectors" in a little pack for $4 at Walmart too. Since I was threading the cord through the metal rings, and then simply tying the cord off, I had to find a way to ensure that the cording wouldn't, over time, just come untied. So after tying off the cord, I cut it about 1/2" past the knot; then I slid a crimp bead over the end (very tricky, since these are super-tiny beads that barely fit over the cord), pushed it down to the knot, and squeezed it shut. A "crimped" crimp bead just sort of flattens into a little rectangle. So to make it smaller - and to doubly secure it - I grabbed one side of the bead with the chain nose pliers, bent the crimp bead in half, and clamped the two sides together. 


Another necklace I did used several layers of some larger chain, a lot of pearls, and a whole lot more head pins. You may have seen some versions of this in the department stores. 

Pearl cluster necklace

Each pearl just has a head pin through it, and then has a jump ring attaching the head pin's eye to the link on the chain - simple, but fancy.

This necklace below (another sneak peak) is about as basic as it gets - one strand of eye-pin beads linked together with jump rings.

Another variation of the one-strand necklace is to intersperse sections of linked beads with some chain. The style of the necklace below is popular because it "works" with almost any style of shirt (given it's length). 

Long, single-strand necklace with beads & chain

The earrings for this necklace also incorporate the chain. A small piece of chain is attached to the eye of the earring - and then the beads (with head pins) just connect to the links of the chain, all the way down. 

Budget Ideas
To be quite honest, I don't really have the budget to just go out and buy strands of beads all the time. And that's okay - I know my husband would agree that our money would be better spent by being saved (even if these do qualify under the "gift" budget). So here's how I've been able to make this work for me (and if it works for you too, great!):

• Re-purposing beads - I have a collection of beads off of old necklaces that just didn't work for me, or broke beyond repair, etc. My kind mother has also donated some of hers as well. That being said, I've actually ended up using a lot of these beads in my jewelry-making. Some of them are even used in the necklaces above - can you tell which ones? :-)
• Buying filler beads in bulk - you can get a lot of "silver" or pewter & bronze-looking beads in bulk at stores like Michael's (which I buy with one of their 40% off coupons). They're usually made out of plastic or a cheap metal, but that's okay too, as long as they look decent. I've just found that it works just as well to use these as to spend twice as much on a smaller strand of silver or solid-metal beads. 
• Buying in Bulk on specialty beads - for this, Amazon is the place to go. I wanted to do a Pandora-styled bracelet for my mom for mother's day, so I was checking into "Pandora beads." You can usually buy a strand of 5 or 6 of them at Walmart/Michael's for about $4. However, you can get a bag of 50 of them on Amazon for around $10. It was totally worth the investment for me to do this. I've used these beads for countless pieces of jewelry for people already. I also purchased a bag of 40 silver-plated charms for these bracelets as well. The coffee charm is my favorite. :-)

Well, I hope you got some new inspiration from reading this. If you were just bored, I'm sorry for rambling so long. But I have good news! One of these necklaces is going to be featured tomorrow as a part of our first give-away. So make sure to check back and enter. Thanks for reading!