clownin around

Remember when Lil Nas X beautifully explored his sexuality, seduced and killed the devil to the banger of all time, and instead of cheering on this openly gay and proud Black artist for his artistry and fighting back against respectability politics, suddenly said respectability politics was all the Queerest Place on the Internet cared about? Hm. Wonder what happened there.

you have been turned into this cat breed!

A few peeps wanted to see how i made my wonderful tattoo chokers, so hey, heres a tutorial!

*disclaimer, this is my first ever tutorial so prepare for shitty camera quality, and i also dont know the legit names of some stuff so ill just call those things… things… lets go!

What you’ll need is:

1. cutting pliers, flat pliers, and crimp pliers 

2. stretchy cord/string of some kind, you can find black cord at walmart, if you want it colorful you can find some on amazon

3. cord end thingies (2 small) and jump rings (you only need one ring)

After you have all the stuff you need, get two pieces of the cord, each piece being 53 inches (or 137 cm) if your making a choker, do about half of that for a bracelet

In the picture the cord is black but im using two different colors (pink and green/blue) for the tutorial

Once you have the cord cut, put one of the cord ends into the crimping plier, put the two cords next to each other and use the pliers to wrap the cord end around the cord

Once your done with that, to make the actual loopy swirly prettiness that is the choker, put the pink cord in front of the blue, and bring it up and back and around (like in the picture) pull the pink cord to tighten the loop and make it smaller

Then bring the blue in front of the pink, wrap it around and doooooo the thing.

Go back and do what you did to make the pink loop, then the blue, then pink loop aaaaannd blue loop and just keep on going until you get the the length you want (its stretches, so dont make it to big!)

Once you get it to the length you want, cut it off and use the crimp pliers and the second cord end and do the same thing you did at the beginning. Then grab the jump ring.. All jump rings have a little… thing in them (the little notch type deal that you can see in the top right picture) and i like the use the cutting pliers to “cut” into the notch and open up the ring more. (like in the bottom left picture)

Then you put the jump ring through the hole in the cord ends and use the flat pliers to close the jump ring up

And tadaaaa, your done!

The chokers I made are about 10-11 inches around (~27 cm) when I finish them, so dont make them to big because they can stretch enough to fit over your head (they will look a bit silly but they bounce back just fine)

Heres some tips:

1. Use stretchy cord/string thats under 1mm thickness. The colorful cord I have is 1mm, the black is .7mm

2. Dont use wire, yea I tried, doesnt stretch or work half as well

3. You can find black cord at walmart, I also found the colorful cord there but it was wrapped around a board and not around something circular, make sure your cord is wrapped on something circular if you want it to turn out okay, you can buy colorful cord like that on Amazon