Jewelry Making 101; Basic Techniques Turorial

Today on DIY with Designer Co. I'm going to be teaching you some of our most common jewelry making techniques you'll use again and again. Crimping, jump rings, head pins, and eye pins. First I'm going to teach you a technique called crimping. Crimp beads are used in place of a knot to hold beaded projects in place. Choose a crimp and add it to your piece of wire. Next you want to add your attachment piece. This might be a clasp or a piece of chain. Take the end of your wire, bring it over your clasp, and back through your crimp bead. Slide your crimp bead over to your clasp or chain to close up that loop. Using your needle nose pliers, flatten the crimp. Now you're ready to string your beads. When you're done beading you're going to add another crimp bead to the end of your wire. This time you can let it fall to meet your beads. Choose your second connecting piece, this might be the other end of your clasp, to the wire. So you should have beads, crimp, and your second attachment piece. You're going to bring the wire over that attachment piece, in this case my clasp end, bring it through the crimp bead and also through one or two beads, regular beads. Pull the end of your wire and your second attachment piece and pull them away from each other gently but firmly if it gets stuck just readjust your crimp and keep pulling. Pull, pull, pull until everything is snug and you've closed up that loop as much as you can. Use your needle nose pliers to flatten this crimp. Give it a squeeze and once your shirt's secure and the crimp is flattened then you can use your wire cutters to cut off any extra wire. The crimping technique can be used for any beading projects like necklaces, bracelets, earrings, or anklets. It can also be used as a component of another project that is not completely beaded. Now I'm going to teach you how to open and close jump rings. Jump rings are used as a linking piece between pieces, attaching clasps, or just connecting pieces together. What you want to on your jump ring find your opening. Every jump ring should have one opening in it. You're going to have that opening looking up at the ceiling. Pick up a pair of needle nose pliers in your dominant hand and clamp down close to one side of the opening. With your other hand pick up a second pair of needle nose pliers and clamp down on the opposite side of the opening. Now what I'm going to do is keep one wrist stationary and I'm just going to be twisting one of my wrists. It also helps to rest your arms or your elbows on the table to steady your hands. So I'm just twisting one of them, just my right hand towards me, and opening it up just as much as I need to and no more. So I'm going to take another jump ring. I'm going to link that one into my open one. Now to close your jump ring you want to pick up your second set of pliers again, clamp down on the opposite side again, and again I'm going to move my right wrist. This time I'm going to move it away from me just to bring those two ends together. Now I'm going to open my second jump ring and connect another one. So again I am just linking jump ring to jump ring to jump ring. You may not find yourself doing this very often. You might find yourself needing jump rings to connect links together, to add charms to a bracelet, to attach earring hooks to a pendant. Lots of purposes but essentially it's a link so it's connecting two pieces together. Now I'm going to show you how to finish head pins and eye pins. Head pins are used when you want to connect only one end of your pendant to something and eye pins are used when you want to connect both ends to something. The technique to finish them is exactly the same. The first step for both head pins and eye pins is to add your beads to the pin. You can add as many as you like just being sure to leave at least one centimeter of wire exposed at the end. When you're finished adding your beads use a needle nose plier to turn the exposed wire at a right angle to your beads. Now use your wire cutters to trim off any extra wire leaving only one centimeter exposed. If all you have left is one centimeter then you don't need to cut anything. Make sure you cover the wire before you cut and now it should look something like this. Before we go to turn our loop you want to make sure that you're holding your head pin or your eye pin with the pin part facing you, the exposed wire facing you and I usually put one finger under here to prevent it from swiveling as I'm working. So I've got a finger under here that I'm holding the beads, the pin's looking at me and then I'm going to line up my round nose pliers on the edge of my wire so that the round nose pliers and the tip of the wire are flush with each other. I'm squeezing quite firmly with the pliers and I'm pressing almost a lick there's a little bit of pressure down on my hand so down and roll away in one movement. Now when you're done making your loop if it's a little bit curved you can always put your needle nose pliers onto the loop and just align it so that it's straight. So now I have one complete head pin and one complete eye pin. So the head pin has one side that's flush and one loop and the eye pin has two loops, one on each side. So what I'm going to do is connect my eye pin to my head pin to show you how that works. You want to put your round nose pliers into the loop, gently open not too much because you don't want to distort the shape of the loop and then link your second piece into the existing one. Pop your round nose plier back into that open loop and twist it closed. So now I have my head pin connected to my eye pin. The head pin is flush at one end so I can't connect anything else to it. The eye pin has a loop at an exposed loop at one end so at this point I could either connect other links to it, I could connect a piece of chain to it, I could connect wire to it, and I could create a necklace, a bracelet, or whatever else you want to create. Put all of these techniques to use in the projects below like the mosaic necklace, the boho bracelet, or the waterfall comb.