Beginner Jewelry Part 2: Connecting Wire-wrapped Loops to Make a Tassel Necklace

1. Intro and Class Project: Hi, I'm terrifyingly, I'm an artist and art instructor living in the wilds of main. Welcome to my home studio and to another Skillshare class. In today's class, I'm going to teach you how to make a necklace. Really two necklaces. One with a single beat and the tassel, and the other two freebies in a castle, these necklaces look as good with the dress as they do with jeans and boots. I got started making my own handmade jewelry because I couldn't find jewelry that exactly fit my tastes at the time. And I have continued to make jewelry for myself and my friends and family for the last 20 years. In my last video, I showed you how to make a single wire wrap loop and we made these earrings. In today's class. We're going to build on those skills and tickets to the next level. We're gonna take that wire wrap loop that we learned in the first jewelry class and work on a double it. So we're going to put it on opposite ends of individual pieces of wire. And we're going to connect those loops together into a sort of chain. These skills along with how to put a class on a necklace, how to attach ear wires to a loop. How to work with chain, and how to work with jump rings will allow you to make a huge variety of jury. You can make all of these different types of jewelry with just these techniques. With the holiday season coming in with supply chains being interrupted, a lot of people are going to turn to making handmade gifts. And this is the best way that you can give a little piece of yourself and your creativity to the ones you love. And who knows, maybe you'll start your own Etsy store and turn us into a business. I can't wait to get started and I hope you'll join me. 2. Supplies Explained: Anytime I'm teaching, I tried to give you the reasons behind what I use and why I use it. So I want to get into some detail about the supplies. First of all, these are chained nose pliers and they do not have the groupie teeth the hardware store pliers have on them. Sometimes people will sell groupie teeth pliers as jewelry pliers, and they are not. So always look for that yourself. The main focus of this class is on connecting loops. And so these round nose pliers are essential for making those loops. Round nose pliers are just a must have tool for your jewelry making arsenal. Most children every tool sets will contain chain nose pliers and roundness flyers, but they may not contain flush cutters. And that is something I'm going to talk about in a minute. Most of the time when we're making jewelry, we are using both hands and we have a tool on each hand. These bent nose pliers are really useful and if you can afford to get them in addition to these three, I highly recommend it. Having both chain nose and bent nose is going to allow you to do more with ease. All right, here we see someone advertising these as professional jewelry making tools. But you can see that I've circled the gripping teeth and I'm also pointing out with a little red arrow that these have so-called built-in cutters. These cutters are worthless for jewelry making. They're really only good for crafts. If you are serious about making jewelry, you're going to need a really good set of flush cutters or side cutters. Here you can see the zeros and microtia flush cutter. This is what I use. And they are important because they have little narrow jaws that can get into tight spaces. And the reason why they're called flush cutters is that they will make a flat or flush cut on the wire, which is less sharp and pokey, then you get with other types. Wire cutters. Most jewellery tool sets do not come with flush cutters. Most of them come with these kinds of cutters which you've probably seen before. If this is all you have, go ahead and try it. But if you're going to be making jewelry professionally selling and NFC, you don't want to use wire cutters like this. You're going to end up with scratchy bits that are going to snag and clothing or scratched people's skin. When it comes to chain, it's really your personal preference. This is the chain I use. I like to use cable chain and I like to use kind of mid grade. It's not very fine if it's to find the wire will not fit through the little holes. If you have an old necklace laying around like this one and you don't wear it anymore. You can try to harvest some chain from that if you want. If you want a shorter necklace, you're going to need a clasp. And you can buy sets of ring clasps that come with jump rings. Or you can get other types of class, but then you would need to purchase jump rings separately. Jump rings are like this. This is a jump ring, and we use those to connect the class to the chain. I've linked some in the description. In the videos. I use four millimeter and seven millimeter. This is the wire I use artistic brand wire. It is coded beetle on wire. German style wire is also good too, but this one is too big. It's 20 gauge. You want to make sure that when you're looking at this, you see the circle. That means that this is regular wire. Sometimes it'll have a square or a half circle and you don't want that. These types of wire, the artistic wire, come in many gauges. 20 to 24 or 26 would be okay for this project, but I'm going to use 22. The problem with 26 is it might be too fine and if the pendant swings around a lot, it might break. You can see that I have my 22 gauge wire fitting through my chain from Michaels. And that's essential because we're going to use the chain as a tassel and the wire needs to go through it. To do that. You can really use any beads for this project. But I wanted to just point out that I really love check glass beads. This is a check glass bead with a Picasso finished, which makes it look like this genuine turquoise bead. I am not a huge fan of the environmental impacts of mining, so I like to use the glass beads whenever I can. Your beads are just going to need to be the right size. In other words, not too big, not too small, and you want to not have a giant hole like that beat I just showed here, because giant hold beads are just going to move around on the wire. And you're never going to want to like buy bigger wire because your bead has a big hole. This little tiny bead is a top drilled, flat, teardrop gemstone B-D. I've linked some similar beads in the description because I just think this is the prettiest necklace and it all fits on there, like so. And you only have to do a loop at the top and the bottom. You can see it up there in the left-hand corner. In terms of beats storage, I really like these little containers that have lids on them because the phishing alert type of container, usually the beads will migrate over the tops. If you decide to use metal beads or if your beads do have a slightly bigger hole for some reason, you can always get some daisies phasors, which you can see here on the right. And those full kind of make a little stopper so that your wire doesn't go straight through the hole. And they also provide a really decorative finish. You'll see me in the video using it to cover up a part of a b that I don't like. All right, so that's kind of an overview of the supplies. And now we're going to go into my example of making a wire wrap loop and I'm going to do it on a large piece of wire so you can see what I'm doing. If you took my first jewelry class, you don't need to watch this next video because you already know how to do this. 3. Wire-wrapped Loop Visual Example: Okay, if you took my first class, we learned how to use head pins or ball pens to make drops like this. And we did one wire wrap loop. The problem is that the bottom, There's no way we can attach something to that. So that's what I'm going to teach you today. I'm going to do a large piece of wire here so that you can see what I'm doing for the first time. So I'm grasping it about a third of the way down and I'm holding it with my round nose pliers, but I'm just using my round nose pliers to hold the wire. I'm not using it to move the wire. I'm using my thumb to press that wire over one side of the jaw there to make that angle. Now, you can see that I'm way down and tool because I have a big wire, so I need a larger loop, but with smaller wire, you'd be further down at the end of the jaws. Now I'm losing my grip and I'm rearranging my tool so that that top jaw, I'll turn my hands. You can see it. That top job is now we're in a position to allow me to utilize it to create a nice circular shape in my wire. I'm going to stop there because I have to reposition my tool again. If I kept my tool as it is now, I would be going around the bottom jaw. I'll just show you it's a mistake all new students make at least once. And it's very hard to undo it. The wire gets all chewed up. Especially with thin wire, these areas become weakened and it's really best to just start over if you make that mistake. But I'm going to keep going with this just because it's just an example. So see how I've rearranged my tool now. I've, I've got the loop in the bottom jaw so that I can go around the bottom jaw to get a circular form. I'm just going to switch hands here so that I can use my dominant hand to move the wire. Whenever I talk about these wire wrapped loops, I usually refer to the shape using some terms. Like I, I, I think it looks like a little man, like a little stick man wearing a scarf. And the long part of the wire is what goes through the bead. And then the shorter part is what wraps around the neck there. So this part is going to wrap around the neck. I sometimes call it the stem. And it's going to form these nice stacked wraps. So for the second part of the loop, we've got our longer part, which is the neck. And then here's his head and here's a scarf. I want the longer part to be in front so that I can wrap the scarf there around it. And this will become more evident hair as I do it. But I'm going to grasp the loop here in either my cheek, nose pliers or preferably my bet nose pliers. You can see how putting the bent nose pliers on there backwards, get, gets the jaws out of the way and leaves the bottom of the loop visible so that I can wrap that scarf around his neck like this right up close without going over the loop, but right up close to the junction. And then I'm going to bring it around again. And as I bring it around the back there, see how it's stacking nicely. I want to keep whatever I loop or whatever I wrap below what was rapped before it. Most times you want to go around two to three times. So I'm going to go around another time. So I've got two beautiful nicely stacked wraps there. And when I flip this over, you'll see that on the opposite side, it really only is wrapped one time. So I'm going to wrap it a little bit more. And that's good. So I've got it right up against this neck. And now I can cut it off. Now this is the back of my cutter and this is the front of my cutter. I want the back of my cutter to be the part that is against the work. In other words, I'm going to put the back of my cutter toward my work and the front is going to be facing me. So again, the back of the tool is sort of flat and the front has little notch in it. And that's how you're going to be able to tell what part to go against your work because we want that cut to be flat like this. See how flat that is? Once again, I'm going to Be careful not to cut my loop. So when you're working with really small wire, you may not be able to tell if your tool is sort of accidentally getting that loop in there and it's going to cut it and then you'll have to start over. But because there's no beat on her. Yeah. I can come in from the bottom and get real close. I'm going to hold the little scrap there so it doesn't go flying because it's going to be really sharp. And if you have kids or animals, you don't want them in adjusting this little sharp piece of metal. It's very, very sharp. The loop is just a tiny little bit peptide. It's not 100% centered on the stock or the stem or the neck. So this is one time when I will use my Reynolds players to actually do work because it will preserve the roundness of that loop as I just tick it over to the side slightly to straighten it. Now I've put a bead on here just so that you can see what the second half of the process is. Well, if we're working with small wire, we would have it down at the end of the jaws, but see how big these nice stack wraps are in order to have enough room to fit those are wraps in under our loop. We need to put our tool in there. That's why it has conical jaws. We need the tool to sort of give us the space for those raps. Later on. I turn it just so that the loops are going in the same direction, it doesn't really matter. And once again, I'm going to show you this so that you can see what it looks like. So I just push away for me to make that angle remove my tool out of there again so that I can reposition it in order to give me the roundness I need for my loop. And I'm going to reposition it in the same place on the jaws as I was prior. And then using my fingers, I'm going to press it against the tool to keep the size uniform. And I stop there with that like hook shape. And then I'm going to reinsert my tool and I'm doing it from the back, but you'll do it this way. I'm just doing it from the back so you can see what's happening. And I'm going to continue around to finish the loop. Notice how I'm not worrying about the bead. It's, the students have a tendency to swing the wire way around. But you're just going to pretend it's not even there and it'll just come out of the way. And then once I get that part finished, this is where we would insert the chain if we were making our necklace. But for now, I'm going to just finish this loop again so that you get the process. Now sometimes if you're working with very hard wire, you might need to use a second tool way out on the end of the wire that you're going to wrap around the neck in order to give you some leverage and in order to get nice tight wraps like we have down here, it just depends on the hardness. And so you're going to be way out here at the ended out wire and grasp. It was another pair of pliers. And you can then go around one time trying to keep that rep right against the loop without going over the loop. Then I'm going to remove that tool and put it back in again so that I'm able to go around one more time and fill in the space between the rapid just made and the bead beneath it. And there you have it. Now you'd never really make this. The beats that shaking. There's no space in there. So I can cut this off. And I just wanted you to be able to see what it looks like. A little bit enlarged so that when you're making your actual jewelry, you'll have a better vision of what you're doing. Coming up next, we're going to make the single bead TESL necklace from start to finish. But first, if you've been following along with me, I want you to take a break, stretch, and relax a little bit. Making jewelry can be tough on your body. And so taking the time to be mindful about body mechanics and stretching and taking breaks is really important. 4. Making a Single Bead Tassel Necklace: The supplies you'll need for the single bead necklace is chain, one feed and a piece of wire about five inches long. Let's make a single bead necklace. I'm going to use 22 gauge wire. I'm going to use this little plastic bead has kind of an iridescent sparkle to it, which I really like. And what I don't like is this shiny plastic top and bottom area right here. See that? This is another time when a daisy spacer can really come in handy and they come in all different sizes. I'm just going to stick this one on the top and the bottom of the bead. I'll put it on a piece of wire so you can actually see what it'll look like. And that'll just kinda cover up that shiny black part and see that. And I like it. I think it looks good. Okay. So I'm going to use about for this size bead, a little more wired than I need. About five inches. Just because I wanna make sure I have enough to work with. And you never want to be trying to do that rap with little tiny snippets. So just like before, I'm going to go faster now. I'm going to put it in there and push it over. I'm going to move my tool, adjust my tool now so that the bottom jaw is in the crux of that angle and the top jaw is above. And because we're working with beads and little wire, I'm going to work on the tippy tip of my tool there. So I have small loops going to go over and make that hook. Remember that? Okay. Next thing is to put the tool back in there and wrap the rest of the way. Putting the tool back in with only the bottom jaw, involve the top jobs just holding it. And I've got half a loop made. Let me get that focused. All right, so there's my half loop now because we're actually making our necklace. We are not going to wrap this loop yet because we need to be able to put the chain in there. Now again, if you want to just make the pendant and not have your chain captured in the top there. You could finish that loop right now. But I like my pendant to be captured in the chain. So I just slid on the daisy spacer and now I'm sliding on the bead and then I'll put on the other Daisy spacer. And this way, I never have to worry, oh, by the way, look, don't go to like a bead store and buy to Daisy spacers because you will absolutely sun one flying across the room and spend half your natural life looking for it. I found it. There it is, but definitely by more than two. All right. So that's on there now. And now I'm going to go ahead and just repeat that exact same process. I'm going to hold the wire with my round nose pliers close to the end of the pliers. So I have not a huge amount of space between the bottom of my loop and my bead. I'm going to press away, move the tool now so that the bottom jaw is in the crux and the top jaw is there to be the mold for my loop. And then I'm going to remove the tool again and put it back in there. So now that only the bottom jaw is involved, the top jobs just holding it and notice how the bead just moved out of the way. I didn't have to swing way out. The bead moved out of the way. Now it doesn't matter if both of your scarves here are going in the same direction or opposite directions. It's really irrelevant because the beat is the same on the top and the bottom. It's also irrelevant where which one is going to be the, the chain and which one is going to be the TESL? So I've got my chain cut here, and this one is about 20 inches long, but you just pick a chain size that works well for you. And you're going to slide the very last loop of that chain over the end of one of the wires and then kind of snap it into place down there in the loop. And then I'm going to pull the chain, the kind of street net. And I'm going to do the same thing. It's going to go in the same loop because this is my neck chain. I suppose you could put it in the other loop and it could be a nice necklace that way as well. And you wouldn't have a tassel, you'd have a bead that was kinda sideways rather than up and down. And that might actually be a good idea if you do that, definitely post a project so I can see it. All right, so I'm just gonna kinda tug on that until they're nice and firm in the loop. And now I'm going to go get my lovely bent nose pliers. And you see how the wire that I'm going to wrap around. The stem there is in front of the stem right now. I'd like to wrap kind of away and then back towards me. And these bet knows have such a tiny little jaw there, just so perfect to get right in there. Notice how I'm not, I'm not smashing my chain and I'm not switching my loop. Now I have a little bit of trouble here because I'm not holding it tight enough to really get a good loop. And you can see how the thinner wire is kind of allowing the stem to bend. So I had to go off camera here. We just spent a little bit. So I straightened it and now I'm going to finish wrapping it. This one is going to take three raps to fill that space. One of the things that I realized after I did that three raps is that really I could have done two reps because now what I've effectively done on the other side is kind of made less space for wraps. But that's okay. I cut that off. And I'm nice and close to it. And I'm careful that my loops not in the jaw of the cutter bee. You could kinda see how that might happen, right? And then I just cut that off and now it's time to make the TESL. So I've got my necklace chain in there. And if you have a long necklace chain, you don't need to have a class, but if you don't want to, I'm just going to straighten that loop out a little bit. Okay, So for the tassel chains, which are going to go at the bottom here, I'm not really very particular about how long there. I don't I I kinda just eyeball it because once they're on there, I can cut them evenly. But and the number of chains that you use is going to kind of impact how far down the chain will hang because of the way that the loop is going to be. So you'll see what I mean if you try to do more than three chains. So I'm measuring this chain in, it's about two and a quarter inches long. The tassel on this necklace is much longer. It is about three and a quarter inches long. So it just depends, this is a longer necklace, so the longer tassel kinda makes more sense. The necklace I'm making a shorter and we'll have a class. So the tassels are going to be just a little bit shorter. And this is really just a repeat of the other side. You just going to slide that on the very end, the very last clasp and then you kinda pull it around really thin wire. You got to be a little careful. But if I grasp both of those there, I can kind of pull on that quite firmly and it'll settle right in there. You're going to repeat that two more times, or however many times you have chains for how ever many? However big a tassel you want. This will look good even with just one chain hanging off the end. And I guess then it would be like a wine Nicholas. Okay. One more chain. Where is it There? It is. Throw that bad boy on there. And look. All right, given get that. Just down around that curve and nestle that right into that loop again. And there we go. They're all in there nicely. And now I'm ready to finish rapidness now I just want to be sure when I use the nice narrow jaws of my nose pliers that I'm not crushing the chain in that loop. And I want to keep the chain kind of out of the way. So in some ways the bent nose pliers are ideal because they can kind of keep the chain at your way. In. Now I'm just going to wrap this around. As I was wrapping it, I felt like I couldn't get a strong hold on it. And I realized that what I said earlier about how I had done three raps on the other side. So what I did is I just held onto the bead and then I pulled hard on those chains and that kinda like snugged up the wraps on the other side, giving me enough room to get one more rap on this side as you're wrapping, just be sure that you don't accidentally go between the daisy spacer in the bead. And there we go. I've got it. Now. I just need to cut that excess wire off. The beat is not moving, it's snug between the two wraps. Now I cut this off deliberately a little bit too long here, see how that's sticking out like that. That's going to catch on your sweater or whatever. So you can try to snug that little tiny piece of wire into place, but you may need to really get in there with your cutters and cut it again. And there you have it. We have a beautiful tassel necklace with one bead and to Daisy spacers coming up next, we're going to make the three bead necklace like this one. And why this is important is that you're going to learn in this next video how to connect links together. So far we've only learned how to connect chain. See you soon. 5. Connection: Making the Triple Bead Necklace: Alright, let's make a three bead tassel. Nicholas. What's different about this is that we just need to pay attention to what is connecting to what. We have these neck chain. We have the center bead, which is connecting to the beat above it and the bead below it. We have the bottom bead which is connecting to the center bead, and it's going to hold our tassel. So it's important to keep this in mind as you're assembling your necklace so that you don't get lost. Alright, I'm going to choose 24 gauge wire for this because my beads are smaller than the single beat neck necklace that I did. You can see them here. There are about five millimeters, six millimeters, round beads. Nothing too special, but I wanted to have a read Nicholas. So now that we've practiced, we can use less wire. And with the smaller beads you need less wire as well. I'm using about three inches, maybe four, and I'm starting just above the center of the wire. I did the first part of the loop where it pushed the wire over and now I'm going to bring the jaws around so that they are on top and right at the tip my tool, I'm going to push that over to get that hook. Again because I'm using small beads, I need small loops. Otherwise the loops are just going to be unsightly. I'm gonna go ahead and move my tool again so that I can pull that loop under the bottom of the jaw. Now, this is where we have to stop and think, do we leave this open? Do we close it? What's going into it? As you can see here, I've decided to start my tassel. So I've inserted two of the tassel chains on there, and I have the second chain still attached to the school. So I'm going to just bring those two chains together and cut one of them off. And then I will attach the third chain to the loop just like we did in the previous video. All right, there's our tassel and a cut that last chain off, even with the other ones. And now I'm going to close this loop because we're done with this loop right now we've got our change in there. Using my chain nose pliers, I'm going to grasp solute to stabilize it. Keeping my chains out of the loop in identifying the scarf that I'm going to wrap around the neck. You can see it's pretty easy to do this when there isn't a beat on there. And I went around two times that I'm just going to cut that little tail off. Now I'm ready to place my bottom bead onto my wire. Next, I'm going to create a wire wrap loop, but I'm not going to close it. So I'm going to get my round nose jaws close to the bead, way down on the end of the tool. Fold-over, adjust my tool, come back over the top, pressing the wire with my finger until I have the little hook made their right against the tip of the jaw. Then I can adjust my tool and bring the loop the rest of the way around. I don't have to worry about the bead. It's going to move out of the way. And I'm going to stop here. Now I'm thinking, what's next? I can close this loop. I can wrap this loop because I can utilize the loop on the middle bead to attach into there. So this can be finished off here, just like a single tassel necklace would be. Alright, so now I'm going to start with another piece of wire and begin a loop about a third of the way along that wire. I'm going to press away or just my tool. Press over top, adjust my tool again and pull it the rest of the way around. Now I'm going to stop. And I'm going to stop before I close that loop. But I could have closed it and I could have attached the top beak to it, but I decided just to stop here and put the bead on and then go ahead and make another loop halfway. So around the tool, get the little hook, reinsert the jaw, pull out around. And now I have the ability to attach something to the top and bottom of this piece. I'm going to grab my tassel. And I mean, it doesn't matter which side I use. And I'm just going to slide that onto the one of the wires and snap it into the loop there. And now I can close that loop now that I know that in there. And it's nice and snug. I'll go ahead and grab my tool and begin to close this loop just like I did all the other ones. So I've got my chain nose pliers. I'm using my fingers to wrap around two times and then I will cut that little tail off. Again, I could have finished the other side of this loop and left the bottom of the top bead open. But I didn't. However, I am going to do that now because I can again leave the bottom loop of the top eight open. This is very short wire. So I'm going to use a tool like I talked about in one of the other videos to help me wrap the wire around my bead. Sometimes you just can't get a hold of those little fiddly ends of wire. So I'll wrap that around snugly and then cut it off. Again, being careful not to cut my loop. So I have a little tail there. I'm going to snag that with my supplier if I can. Yep. Great. That worked out well. And now I have the bottom part of my knuckles finished and all that's left to do is the top bead. Alright, I've cut my last piece of wire and just like before, I'm going to start about a third of the way, bend it over, move my tool, push against the jaw to make my hook. And I have the hook made, reinsert my tool. And I'm going to go the rest of the way around that last jaw and I'm going to stop. Now I'm going to slide my remains of my pendant on to this loop and finish it off. It's swinging freely so I can grab my chain nose pliers and grasp my loop and finish this loop off just like the other ones. So I'm gonna pull this around. Once again, the wire is so short that I need to use pliers to helped me get it around. And I'm taking my time with it using my fingers to kind of help the wire along. And once I have two wraps, then I'm just going to put on the top bead. I want to wait to cut this tail off until I get that top bead on there because it's going to help my raps snug see, I'm pulling the bead down just slightly, just to snug those wraps up a little bit. All right, here's our last half loop and a bend over. Move my tool, press it over the top. Move the tool again so that I have it in there making a nice circle. And I want to stop here because I want to embed this loop in my necklace chain. Even if I was going to put a clasp on this, I would do the chain this way, which is, I have one long piece of chain and I slide each of the cut ends of that chain into that loop. And I make sure that I straighten the chain now as I'm doing it so it's not twisted. Snap it in there. And then I can finish this loop off. If I want a clasp, I can cut the center, like I showed you in the class video and add it later. But now I've got my chain on there, and this is going to be a long necklace. I'm going to finish off my top loop here. And just wrapping around. You have to kind of watch it as you're doing this while you have all this stuff hanging down, you know, you've got your rest of your pendant, you've got your knuckles chain, and you don't want to accidentally catch any of that in your wrap. Now I could cut both of these tails off because I am satisfied with the way that's wrapped and my necklace is finished. Just going to hold it here and double-check on the length of my tassel chains to make sure that they're all even. I can kind of pull them down and my fingers as if I was giving a haircut and make sure that they're all level. There is one that's hanging down just a tiny bit further than the RESTful snip that off. I'm not sure if I mentioned it before, but you could connect beads infinitely. You've never have to put chain on either end. You can just connect beads along and have an entire necklace made that way or an entire bracelet. Just throw clasp on the end and you're done. Speaking of clasps coming up next, I'm going to show you how to add a class to the necklace. If you want one. 6. Adding a Clasp: I put a class on this one already and my camera wasn't filming, so I'm gonna put a clasp on this one and I'm going to make it shorter. I think this is a really pretty little necklace and I think it will look better, shorter. So what I'm going to do to determine how long I want it to be is. I'm just going to line it up with the necklace that I already put the class fun because I liked the length of that. And then I'll just sort of smooth out the chain until I get to where the clasp is on the first necklace. And that's where I'm going to grasp the second Nicholas. And I'm just going to straighten the chain out a little bit, make sure that it's not twisted so that I have pretty even amounts of chain on each side. And then I can come in with my flush cutters and cut it. By cutting it here, I have a longer piece of chain that I could use for another project. When you're cutting chaining, just want to make sure that you get through the entire length. You may need to just tug on it a little to get it to come part. Now I was shortening this necklace. But if I wanted to put a class on longer necklace and I wanted it to stay the length that it is already. All I would need to do is just put my finger in between here as I hold on to the pendant and then run it down until I get to the end. And then somewhere in that end part is where I would cut and I would put the clasp on one side. And the thing that the class but attaches to in this case is seven millimeter jump ring on the other. Don't throw away the spare parts of chain. You can use these to make your tassel, or you can use them in other projects like earrings or anything like that. In fact, in the bonus video, I'm going to show you how to make a pair of earrings with one chain per earring. Alright, here's a lobster clasp. And these, you've probably seen these before. You could also use a ring class or any kind of class that you like. But this is what I'm going to use. It's very easy to come by and I'll just show you this as the ring class that I used on the other necklace. They all have these little leavers that are used to open them. I like to use seven millimeter jump rings as the thing to connect the clasp into when I take the necklace on and off. Because I just find them easier to deal with. But if your class becomes with a connector apart, that you can just use that that's no big deal. I like to connect my class to the chain using a four millimeter jump ring. And then again, like I said, the oval jump rings are nice to connect on the other side because they have a slit on the side of the jump spring and are less likely to slip off accidentally. I'm going to show you the correct way to open and close a jump ring on this ridiculously large one. You can see that there's a slit in the top. This is a 10 millimeter jump ring, which you probably wouldn't really use for jewelry, but I want you to be able to see what I'm doing. So I use my thumbnail to find the slit in the top, and then I'm going to use a tool on either side to open the jump ring the proper way. This is one, having those bent nose pliers really comes in handy because round those players aren't great to use, to try to open jump rings and you'll see me try to use that here. They're just not as Griffey. They're not really meant for using to do work like this, but you're going to put one pair of pliers on one side and one pair of pliers on the other side. And then you're going to open it like almost like one goes up, the other goes down. You're never going to try to pry them apart. You're going to bring one away from you and one towards you. Let me show you what happens. Most people make the mistake of opening and closing. Jump rings, Bye, trying them apart like this. And this is the wrong way to do it because you almost never can get them to go back the way that they should be. It weakens areas of the metal and it ends up looking very amateurish. I can hardly even get it to close. It's so hard to do because it's not meant to be opened or closed that way. A jump ring is a cult connection, which means no heat is used. We're not using solder to close the little gaps. So you wanna make sure that you open and close the jumping the correct way so that your jewelry is less likely to fall apart. One of the reasons I like oval jumping so much is that the slit is on the side rather than on the top or the bottom. The stress put on jewelry means that it would be on the top or the bottom. So with the slit on the side, your chain is less likely to slip through. As long as you open and close jump rings the proper way, you're less likely to have the chain slipping through. So don't worry too much if you can't find the oval ones. Here is my four millimeter jump ring and my lobster class. I'm going to take that four millimeter jump ring and I'm going to insert it into the little opening on the side of the lobster class after I open it. And again it's tiny little thing. Just want to find the little slit. And then you're going to use two tools to open it. You'll see me pushing one part away and pulling one part towards me. Kind of like almost like a spring or a spiral rather than trying it apart. Like I showed you before, many clasps will come with what you need to connect them. And some clasps will have a little tiny slit in the loop on the end of the class down here. I don't like trying to use this to connect it to my chain. In other words, prying this little thing open and putting it through my chain because it's just too small to work with. And that's why I'm using the four millimeter jump ring here to put through that little loop and then attach the class but to the chain. It can be a little fiddly head, you're going to drop it. And so just try to be patient and you'll get it. Success at last. Now I'm just going to quickly grab my other tool so that I can put this jumping back together in the exact same way that I opened. So a tool on either side and be careful sometimes the tools almost have a magnetic quality to them and the channel kind of stick to it and come out of the jump ring. If you have a hard time seeing like I do, you might want to purchase a magnetic ring, not a magnetic ring like a magnifying ring light, which will allow you to light your work and look through so that you can see magnified that little tiny space and make sure that it is closed and secure. Just going to use my pliers to just kinda like make sure those two ends are nice and flat. And here we go. We've got our clasp on one side and now we're going to take the oval jump bring and attach it to the other side so that we have something for our lobster class to clip onto and we take our necklace on and off. Again. We're going to find the opening and the jump bring place our tools on either side of the open opening. And we're just going to pry it apart by pulling part of it towards us and pushing part of it away from us. It's the exact same process with an oval and might be a little bit harder to kind of get the tools in the right place. But once you get that open and you're just going to keep holding onto it with one of the tools. Grab the other side of your chain and slip it on to the jump ring. Now that's on there, nice and tight. And we can just close it up, make sure it's lined up. Sometimes you have to go just slightly past lined up in order for it to spring back in the right place. Now I can attach it like I'm putting the necklace on and there you have it. There is your finished class. And it'll work exactly the same way if you use a ring class, but they're basically the identical process. Coming up. I'm gonna give you a bonus video, actually cube bonus videos one is going to be how to make earrings with the same skills that we learned today. Except for we're going to add a skill in that with this extra little bit of wrap wire on the outside of the bead. And I'm also going to have an optional video which will take you through step-by-step in doing the wire wrapping with a visual diagram with written words. Some people do better with that. So I wanted to provide it, but you don't have to watch it. If you've got it, you can skip that one. All right. I'll see you in the bonus. 7. Optional Written Diagram and Talkthrough: All right, I made a series of diagrams to help you with this concept. So you're going to start out by cutting three lengths of either 2022 or 24 gauge wire depending on the size of your bead and what will fit through the loops of your chain. Cut more than you think you'll need until you master the skill of wire wrap loops. I usually start out with four to six inches of wire. Start by making a complete wire wrap loop. You're going to learn this in my first class, beginner jewelry making, mastering wire wrap loops. Then azure be that you want to be in the center of the three beads in this pendant. Finish a loop on the other side. If you only want one bead between the duct chain in the tassel, you're going to need different instructions. So hold on, I'll give you those at the end. So as you can see here, you can finish both loops at the center bead because you can interlock the subsequent loops into that set of loops on that center bead. Before you wrap the first loop of the second bead, you're going to insert the partially made loop into one of the loops on the center page. So in other words, start a loop about a third of the way down your second piece of wire. And before you wrap it, stick it into one of the sides of the center bead. Then finish your rap and cut the excess. Make sure you're cutting what you wrapped around the stem and not the stem. And now you have one permanent join. Next you're going to slide your bottom bead on there. And you're going to begin a loop so that, that bottom B to snug up against the first loop. And before you close that second loop on that bottom bead, you're going to add your tassel chains, sliding them over the edge of the wire and down into that curve of the partial loop. Make sure you keep those chains in the loop as you close the loop and wrap that particular joint. Alright, now it's time to add the last bead. So first we're going to begin a loop on a new piece of wire about a third of the way down. And before wrapping to close it, you're going to slide it onto this loop that you see here. And now you can wrap that loop. Okay? So finish wrapping that loop. And make sure again, when you cut this, that you're cutting off the access wire and not the stem because the stem is where the bead goes. So if you cut off the stem, you're going to have to cut the loop off and start over. Azure last bead. This is going to be the beat at the top of your piece. So if you're using different beads in your three beads stack, you're going to want to keep track of which beat is which. You're going to leave that final loop open so that you can add the neck chain. So start the final loop but don't wrap it yet. Then add the neck chain. If you don't want your pendant to be permanently attached to the neck chain. In other words, if you want to be able to slide this on and off like a pendant and use it on different chains. Then you're going to want to make sure that the final loop you make at the top is big enough so that whatever size chain you decide to use, and however that chain is finished on each end, it will fit through that loop. However, if you do want your pendant to be sort of embedded in the chain so that it doesn't slide, your chain doesn't slide around and the class comes in the front. What I do is I take my one length of neck chain and I take the two ends that are cut and I slide them on to that loop. And then I finish that loop. So make sure when you slide the two ends, the chain on, that you've kinda straightened the chain out a little bit so it's not twisted. This way. We can make a clasp later if we want or if we don't want a class, we can just leave it as it is. Now you're going to finish that final loop and you're going to cut off the excess. If you make a mistake at all, just cut off the mistake part and start a new piece of wire. But you should be done now in your tassel necklaces complete. If you wanted a single bead hang on. I'm I got you. I'm coming in with that right now. So with a single bead, you're going to start with a loop. So you're going to start with one piece of wire. Begin the loop, but don't close it. Add the chain if you want it to be permanently connected to the chain. If not, just close the loop, but make it big enough again for the chain to fit through. Then you're going to add your bead. Then you're going to start a loop, but don't close it. And that's where the tassels are going to go. And then once those chains are in there, then you can finish off that bottom loop by wrapping the wire around. And now you have a tassel necklace with a single bead. This can actually be great for earrings. You can put just a loop at the top. Actually, you know, up, I'm just going to give you a bonus video and show you how to make earrings because I think that that would be tons of fun. And that's it. Don't forget you can pause these instructions anytime and watch this as many times as you need in order to get the concept. It's confusing if you haven't done it before. So if you're having a hard time, don't get frustrated. You might want to just set everything down and take a breath, take a break, come back, and just look at the video without trying to actually make the necklace while you're watching it. I find that that can really helped me with frustration. And when I'm not as frustrated, I don't make as many mistakes. That being said, remember, mistakes are how we learn. Throw anything in life without mistakes, there's less innovation and discovery. Some of the best things that I've found creatively have come out of a so-called mistakes. So embrace mistakes as part of the learning process. And you will definitely be happier and you'll be more successful. 8. Bonus Video: Earrings With a Twist: Welcome to your bonus earrings video. I think these earrings are going to make great gifts and I can't wait to show you them. Every year, I make Christmas spiders as gifts. And if you're interested in learning how to make those, let me know and I'll do a class on it. I came across these Christmas spiders and I realized that doing a single tassel hearing is a good way to use some of these large kind of gaudy beads that we might not normally want to wear his jewelry. So I have one here. It's a quite a large kind of cut glass bead, not my style at all. But I made it into this single tassel earring and I now love it. And so I thought I would show this to you and show you how to do this as a special bonus. So in addition to this being a good practice for doing a single castle necklace, I'm also going to show you a little decorative wire. We'll make the second earring here with this big cut glass bead. To do this technique, you're going to need a little bit more wire then you would need for the other ones. So I'm going to cut about six inches a wire. It's going to depend on the size of your bead. This bead is about an inch, maybe an inch and a quarter tall. And I just want to find where the center of the wire is, roughly within that bead. And then I'm going to just give it a little bend there so I know where to start my loop. This loop is made exactly the same way as in the single bead necklace. Essentially, it's identical except for this little extra technique with the access wire. If you don't know how to attach your wires, you should watch my first jewelry class. So I've made my first half of my loop here. And because I'm going to attach an ear wire to it and the ear wire has its own opening. I don't need to leave this loop open. I can just close it. Normally I would cut this excess off, but I'm not gonna do that. I'm going to make sure that I have the excess up here in that I have the length of more wire, which is this stem at the bottom. And I'm going to thread my bead on there. We're not going to cut that extra wire off because we're going to use that to add a decorative element at the end. So now I'm going to make my bottom Luke halfway. So I'm going to do the first part which is bending it and then turning the tool and bending it over the tool. Turning the tool again and bending it the rest of the way over, noticing that the bead just moves out of the way. I don't have to move the wire. The bead moves out of the way. And now I've got half a loop made. This is where I can add one to many tassel chains. And I think when you're working with a large beads like this, that a single chain can actually be a really nice way to offset the chunky newness of the bead and to kind of make it a little bit more delicate. So I cut my chain roughly the size of the other chain and I can even those up later. Just sliding it on to the loop just like we did for the necklaces. And then I will be making sure that I keep the chain in the loo before I finish wrapping it. So with my bet nose pliers, I'm just going to hold that and I'm just going to wrap that around like two times because I want a little bit of extra space. Because here comes the fun part. You see now we have one wire going off to the side on the top and another wire going off to the opposite side on the bottom. We want them to be on opposite sides to allow us to make this decorative wrap around our B. So I'm going to try to zoom in here. So you can see, here we go. You can see how the wire, the direction, the wires wrapping. So I want to notice that direction because I want to carry that around again. But this time rather than wrapping it around the top stem, I'm going to take it in a diagonal down across my bead without worrying too very much about how it looks. I just kinda want it to sort of go down and Nestle at the bottom there. And I'll wrap it around that bottom set of loops. And you just want to make sure you don't get your chain caught up in there. The most secure thing would be to wrap it at least all the way around one to two times. So on c, I think it's so hard for me to do this in the frame, but you can see that I've wrapped it around that existing bottom loop there. And it's going in a diagonal from top to bottom across the face of my bead. And now we're gonna do the same exact thing with the leftover wire from our bottom wrap. So we're going to pull it up and go to the opposite side of the top loop and wrap it around there. And you can see that wrap now better. And I wrapped it around there two times. Now I can cut the excess wire off. The reason why it doesn't really matter if the wire going across to beat as in some perfect configuration, is that we're going to make a decorative crimp in this bead now that are in this wire now that's going to sort of tighten it up. See how on this side it's nice and diagonal. But when I flip it over the other side looks a little wonky. No problem, we're going, this is what this technique is designed for. So get your roundness fire. And you're going to go ahead and grasp that wire somewhere near the middle. And you're going to grasp it tightly and you're just going to give it a little turn. See how I just gave it a little turn. And it made that cute little like lightning bolt shape, right? And it also managed to tighten that wire more closely against the bead. And now I want to do the same thing on the other side. So even though on this side it's not loose, I want both sides to look the same because it's just going to be more uniform no matter which way the earring is facing. And it worked out quite well. So I'm really happy with us. It's so cute. This is going to be so nice for like a holiday party if we have holiday purchases here. So now I'm going to add a bare wire to this and I don't like fees ear wires that you see, so I don't recommend this kind, but you'll find ear wires that you like and that you are finding easy to work with. And again, to learn how to attach into your wire in more detail. Please see my first beginner jewelry class because I get into detail with it there. And now I've got that attached. Just want to close that up. Oh, it broke. This will happen. So the different companies that make ear wires, you know, some of them use harder metals. And anytime that we are moving wire, whether we're working with it with our hands, are working with it with tools. We run the risk that we're going to break it because wire doesn't want to be worked back and forth. Okay. I've got those two earrings made and they're so cute. I love them so much. And this is a great way to use beads that you might not normally like. And you can use up leftover chain bits. Okay. I hope you enjoyed that. And thank you so much. 9. Conclusion and Thank you: All right everyone, I hope you enjoyed this class. I hope that the extra examples are helpful to you. And I really can't wait to see what you make, even if you don't make the exact class project, but you use your skills that you learned today to make something. Please post it in the project section because I'd really love to see it. Most of all, what I want to impart to you is that just like anything else in life, we get better at things by practicing. So don't set out to make a perfect masterpiece the first time that you sit down to learn a skill. All right, I'll see you in my next class. Bye.