#beading tutorial

What you need

Wire

You want to have a wire that's fine but that won't kink easily. If you go for a fine silver or gold wire that's just a single strand of the metal then it's very easy to get a bend into the wire accidentally that won't easily come out again. I like Beadalon 7 strand beading wire for this because it holds its shape well. They have a few different colours as options. I'm sure there are other brands out there that are similar, but this is a style that was sold at the shop I got my beads at when I first started and I've not seen any reason to change because it does what I want it to for these sort of projects. If you've tried other brands of wire you find work really well for this, please share the names.

Beads

You don't need loads of beads to make a floating wire necklace work because you'll space things out. You can use all the same type of bead, or make a pattern out of different sizes, shapes, and colours. It's entirely up to you. The main thing to check is the size of the holes. You want nice, small holes. We'll be using crimps to hold the beads in place and we want the crimps to be small and unobtrusive, which means that the length of the crimp, when flattened needs to be larger than the diameter of the bead's hole. A hole of about a millimetre is good. More than that and it would be hard to achieve the effect. There are options if you do want to use beads with larger holes, but I'll leave those for another post.

Crimps

Crimps come in different varieties, but the simplest and the ones you'll find often referred to as simply "crimps" without any other descriptions or modifiers are tiny, metal cylinders. When you put them on a wire and squeeze them with a pair of pliers, the cylinder flattens around the wire into a little rectangle that will hold its place. This is what we use to create the illusion effect. In theory, you need twice as many crimps as the number of beads you're planning on using, but have a few spare because they are very easy to drop.

Half-open crimps/crimp covers

These are shaped like small spheres that someone's taken a slice out of. These can be slid onto the wire from the side instead of needing to be fed in from the end. They're not the only options, but I find they work well (especially if you start making necklaces with multiple wires which is one of the options for building on this idea).

Fastening mechanism/clasp

You need something to open and close the necklace. Personally, I like a toggle. I find these much less fiddly than standard spring clasps or lobster claw fasteners so basically every necklace I make these days uses a toggle, but it's entirely up to you what sort of fastener you want.

Ideally, you will have a match of colours/metals between the crimps, half-open crimps and the fastening mechanism. Here, I’ve used silver for all of them. It’s not the end of the world if you have a clasp of a different colour as it will be hidden around the back, but it’s better to match if you can.

Pliers and wire cutters

The only tools you'll need for this are pliers and wire cutters. There are many types of pliers out there and most of them will work here, but you'll have a much easier time with a pair of flat nose pliers than round nose pliers for this project. I couldn't find my good flat nose pliers when I went to start on this project, so I used a pair of bent-nosed pliers and they were perfectly fine. Basically, a flat squeezing surface will be easier than a rounded one, but at the end of the day, all you need is something that will squeeze.

The Process

Step 1: Cut your wire

Figure out how long you want your necklace to be and then add on a couple of inches as a safety margin and to give yourself enough extra wire to attach the fastener. If you're unsure how much you need, always over-estimate. You can easily trim excess wire off later, but you can't add more on. If this is your first time doing something like this, give yourself maybe an extra five inches to give yourself plenty of room. This also means that if you accidentally position the beads off-centre, you can trim one end of the wire to fix that issue. Once you've worked out how long a piece of wire you're going to want, cut that length with the wire cutters.

Step 2: Place a crimp by the mid-point

Slide one of the crimps onto the wire (the cylindrical crimps, not the half-open ones) and hold the wire by the two ends. Holding both of the ends together between the finger and thumb of one hand, you can slide your other hand down the two sides of the wire together until you're holding it about an inch from the mid-point. The crimp should be on the wire between your fingers, close to the mid-point of the wire.

You want that crimp to be just to one side of the mid-point. If you do this perfectly, it will be half the width of one of your beads away from being in the exact mid-point - but one of the reasons for giving yourself a bit of excess wire was so that you don't have to be exactly perfect. Holding the wire near the mid-point, take the pliers with your other hand and close the end gently around the crimp. You can use the pliers to position the crimp where you think it is half a bead's width from the middle and then squeeze hard.

Squeezing the crimp with the pliers will flatten it onto the wire and hold it in place.

Step 3: Add your first bead

You now have a wire with a single crimp on it, near the middle. The wire on one side of the crimp will be slightly longer than the other, so place the bead that you want in the middle of your necklace on that side. As long as the hole isn't too big, the bead will slide down as far as the crimp and then get stuck.

Step 4: Add your second crimp

Place a second crimp onto the wire so that it is on the other side of the bead to the first. Use the pliers to position it right next to the bead and squeeze hard, flattening the crimp onto the wire. You should now have a single bead in the middle of your necklace held in place by a crimp on either side.

Step 5: Place more crimps to either side of the bead

You want to add more crimps to your wire, but you want to have a gap between them and the crimps you added in steps 2 and 4. To keep the spacing even, it can be useful to use something as a spacer. This can be basically anything. A bit of card, a watchstrap, whatever you have lying around that will serve to keep the gaps the same. The Beadalon wire that I like to use comes with a plastic cover that holds the wire in place between projects and I like to use this to mark my spaces.

This is where I really struggled to have enough hands to show my process and take the photos.

Slide another crimp onto the wire - it doesn't matter on which side. Hold your spacer item against the wire so that it is pressed up against one of the already flattened crimps on one side. Use the pliers to position the new crimp so that it is against the other side of your spacer item and squeeze hard to hold it in place.

Then do the same on the wire on the other side of the bead. Once done, you should have a single bead in the middle of your necklace and then a pair of crimps on either side of it, the same distance from the bead.

Step 6: Add more beads

Repeat the process of adding a bead and fixing it in place with a crimp that was done in steps 3 and 4. Then repeat the process of adding more crimps as per step 5 and more beads until you have as many on your necklace as you want.

Step 7: Find the point to add the fasteners

Holding the necklace by both sides of the wire up to your neck in front of a mirror, bring your hands behind your neck as though fastening it. Adjust the position of your hands on either wire so that both sides of the wire are touching where you hold them and so that the necklace hangs at the right length and with the first bead centrally positioned. Once you're satisfied that you've got the length and position right, the points you're holding the necklace will be the points where you want to attach the fasteners. Fold the wire firmly at those points to leave a deliberate kink in the wire.

Step 8: Attach the first fastener

Slide one half of your chosen fastening mechanism onto one end of the wire and position it at the point you folded the wire. Now comes the really fiddly bit.

Take one of the half-open crimps and position it over the wire near to the fold. Make sure that the wire is bent double so that it goes through the half-open crimp twice, making a small loop that holds the fastener in place. You don't need to get the crimp right next to the fastener, but it should be fairly close. About a centimetre is fine. When you have the doubled-over wire in the half-open crimp, squeeze hard with the pliers.

I often find that because I'm struggling to hold everything in place, my first squeeze with the pliers isn't quite enough. It starts closing the crimp, but the wire still has some ability to slide. That's fine. Once you've started to close the crimp, it will be easier to keep it in the right place while you squeeze with the pliers again.

Step 9: Attach the second fastener

Slide the other half of your chosen fastening mechansim onto the wire on the other side of the necklace and repeat the process from step 8.

Step 10: Trim any excess wire

You should have a bit of excess wire on each side of the necklace. Cut off the excess with your wire cutters close to the half-open crimps that are holding the fastening mechanism in place.

Finally: enjoy your necklace

This is quite a straight-forward technique once you get the hang of holding crimps, wires, pliers, beads and everything with only one pair of hands. It took me about twenty minutes to make the necklace I'm using as an example - and that includes the time it took to stop and take photographs of my progress.

You can use this as a starting point to build up to more complex and creative necklace designs. Depending on the interest in this post, I will probably do some further tutorial posts that build on this concept and show you what you can do once you've mastered the basics.