Once you’ve gotten a stock of bottle glass bar beads, you can start making some fun jewelry designs.
This bracelet is made with memory wire, bar beads, leather cord and one round bead with a large hole. The memory wire makes the bracelet springy, and the leather cord makes it adjustable for ease of wearing.
Step 1: Choose your bar beads. I’m using 5 different shades of blue, and a total of 15 beads. Altogether, my beads are 7.5″. Laying them out against a ruler like this will give you an idea of how much wire you need for Step 2.
Step 2: Prepare the memory wire. Cut two pieces of memory wire 2″ longer than your bead selection. I cut my wire about 9.5″ long. Remember to use memory wire shears for this, memory wire is very hard and will damage regular wire cutters. After cutting the wire, make loop in one end of each wire using round nose pliers. Make sure the loops are large enough to accommodate your leather cord.
I like to make my loop a double, wrapping the wire around the pliers twice.
Step 3:
Add the beads to the wires. I find it easiest to add the beads to both wires at the same time, otherwise it gets a little floppy and hard to hold on to. (and there’s a nice view of the double rings on the memory wire)
Step 4:
Make loops in the other end of the memory wire.
Trim off the extra with your memory wire shears when you’re done
Step 5:
Add the leather cord for adjustment. I used a piece of leather cord 10″ long, that gave me enough slack to adjust the bracelet to a quite large size when I put it on, and not so long the tails were inconvenient.
Thread the cord through the memory wire loops in a Z shape.
Now bring the ends of the cord together, and put them both through the round bead.
Tie the end of each cord so the bead doesn’t slip off.
Done!
Related Tutorials: