DIY Easy Beaded Cross Pendants Tutorial Inspired by Madonna

So I'm going to show you another way to make a beaded cross pendant. And this is thanks to the feedback of YouTube user Mega Chrissy. She was asking me if I could do a cross pendant that didn't have wires across the back. And I was sketching out some ideas and my daughter Mimi AG, you can check out her channel, suggested that I just use two wires across like that. And I was wondering how am I going to hold them in place? And I figured out I could twist them together with another little wire in the middle. So what you're going to need for this project is 20 gauge artistic copper wire and a thinner gauge like 24 gauge to hold pieces together. And you'll need your flat pliers, your cutters and your round pliers, and also a variety of beads. So what we'll do first is cut our pieces of big wire. So what we're going to do is with the 20 gauge wire, cut a piece that's about three inches. And then another piece for the crossbar that's a little shorter, about two inches or so. And this isn't that important because we can adjust it at the end. So these will be your two basic pieces. And you can flatten them out with your fingers if you like. You'll adjust that at the end as well. So that'll be your basic shape. And then from there, we'll get our 24 gauge wire and cut a bigger piece. I don't know about eight inches or so of that one. Okay, so we've got our wires. Now, tricky part, a little bit tricky, is we're going to take these two wires and hold them in a cross like that. And this is very similar to the technique I use to make my snowflake decorations, where we're attaching the wires together with a separate wire. And so we're going to hold them in place. And then we're just going to put our thinner wire there. And we're going to very carefully start to twist around each one. For sure, when you start, it's a little bit tricky because you have to get them kind of centered. And then we're just going to keep twisting around. So the first one, the second one, we'll twist it around, third one. And then when we get around to where we started, we'll actually clip that little end off because it's going to be easier if we just clip that off like that. And then we keep going with our long wire. So we're going to keep going, twisting around. So around. And depending on how thick this wire is, you could actually go around two or three times, depending on how big of a little clump of wire you want in the middle. And don't worry if it's a little crooked because once you have all the beads on, it's going to look great. So I've gone around about three times. If I was using the 22 gauge wire, I might only go around twice. But this one, it looks pretty good if I go around three times because the wire is a little thinner. And then once you've gone around two or three complete times, we're going to clip the end like that. You can push the little end in with the flat pliers. And then you'll see you have your beginnings of your cross. And now all you have to do is do your beading. So we'll start with the top. And I'm using blue beads. These are about four millimeters. So I think I'll start with this one. Actually, this is six millimeter. This one's six. And then we can space it with some little silver beads if you like. And do another little colorful one. And like that. So whatever pattern you like. And then once you have the pattern you like, you're going to trim the end to about the top. Actually, we're going to leave the end a little bit more, about three-eighths of an inch. And then we're going to take this and go across and loop it like that. So at the top, we have like a nice finished loop. If you like, you can actually cut the wire longer, loop it around, and then twist it around a few times to make it more secure. If it's going to be a pendant and it might have some wear and tear, you could do that. If it's a decoration, you could just make a simple little loop like that. So once we have those ones, we're going to do the ones at the bottom. And you can follow the same pattern if you like. So we'll do about the same pattern, but we'll do maybe a couple of extra beads to make it a little bit longer. Just because sometimes the bottom part of the cross is a little bit longer. So I'll add another little bead. And I'll add another clear bead at the bottom just to make it a wee bit longer. And then same thing, you can trim that to about a quarter inch, three-eighths of an inch. And just turn it with your round pliers. And then all you have to do are these side ones. So same thing, we can follow the same pattern that we had on the top. So here are the finished pendants. As you can see, this one I made a little bit longer and the sides are a little bit narrower. And the beads vary between four and six millimeters. And you can use any combination of glass beads, crystal beads, and metallic space beads.