Jewelry Making for Beginners: Making Color Pencil Jewelry at Home

1. Jewelry Making for Beginners: Making Color Pencil Jewelry at Home: [MUSIC] Hi, my name is Hui. I'm a full-time professional jeweler in the UK. I gained my gemstone knowledge and jewelry making skills by having formal training in the UK, US, and Belgium. After that, I have been refining my knowledge and skills through everyday practice for over 18 years. By taking my class on Skillshare, you will learn professional jewelry making skills at your leisure without having to travel around the world in person like what I did in the old days. I have been making and selling this color pencil jewelry for more than 10 years. They have been delivered to my customers over 30 different countries. I have also been commissioned to make a set of colored pencil jewelry for the counters of Faber-Castell. This is the first time I'm sharing how I make them. Join me in this class and I will walk you through all the steps with my personal tips. In this class, you will learn how to make fun jewelry from beginning to finish. When you finish this class, you'll be confident to make your own color pencils, stuffed earrings, bangle earrings and necklaces from scratch, like a pro, as they are very easy and quick to make. You can make many of them in one go, to have a collection of your own. You can also give them as a surprise handmade gift to your friends and family members on any occasion. The skill you'll practice in this class can also be applied to work on any precious metal and base metal jewelry in future projects. For instance, you will learn how to set up and use a jeweler saw, how to assemble finished jewelry without hot soldering and some basic wire work. This class is for anyone who want to add fun and colors to their everyday life. No previous jewelry making experience is required. If this is your first time making jewelry, you will learn the most basic jewelry making skills and have a taste of making finished jewelry from scratch. Don't miss out. I'll see you in class. 2. Class Project: [MUSIC] Thank you so much for joining this class. Let me show you what we are going to make today. First, we're going to make color pencils stop earring's. Next, we'll be making color pencil dangle earrings in two different ways. Lastly, I will show you how to give your color pencil a distress look, and use them to make your own colorful necklace. The reason I choose this project to begin with is, color pencil jewelry is super easy to make, and the outcome is nothing but fun. With so many colored pencil choices in the market, they are endless, colorful possibilities. As no previous jewelry making experience is required. This is a great step to start for any beginners who are interested in jewelry making, or anyone who wants to add fun, and colors to their everyday life. This jewelry is really simple to make. Getting all the tools, and materials ready will easily set yourself up for a successful project. After that, the key is to go through all the lessons which have been carefully structured, which is a bit more in depth than the one before. In the fourth lesson, I will share with you my various solutions for different problems I have encountered throughout the years making this color pencil jewelry myself. In this way, you'll be able to achieve the best results in no time. The first step to initiate this project before diving into the main lessons is to get all the materials and tools ready. No worries if you have a hard time finding any of these from your local shops. Everything you need is listed in PDF format in the project and resources section with links to purchase online. In this way, you don't even need to leave your home, everything you need to finish this project will be delivered to your doorstep. As you go along, don't forget to share your progress pictures, and all the finished color pencil jewelry you have created in the project gallery. It will be even better if you could share the pictures of how they look on you, or your happy friends, and loved ones wearing the color pencil jewelry you create for them. I look forward to see your colorful creations in the project section. Now, let's get started in the next lesson. 3. Making Color Pencil Stud Earrings: [MUSIC] Am so excited to see you in the class. In this lesson, we're going to start from the easiest project, making color pencils stacked earrings. All you learn in this class will set the foundation for the next two. Let me quickly run through what you will need for this lesson: color pencils, juda saw with a number to saw blade, sandpaper off 320 grit, a ruler, a cocktail stick, it's called toothpick in America or any stick you can find around, a scriber, or anything with a pointy tip, for example, a pin or a screw will work as well, araldite two-part epoxy adhesive, air pin with backed in surgical steel to avoid allergy, finally some old newspaper to cover the surface for easy tidying later. You can download this full list from the project and resources section with the link to purchase online. Super convenient. Once you have gathered all the materials, let's set up your saw. A jeweler saw can almost cut everything from platinum to stainless steel. In this project, we're going to use it for a very soft material. To set a saw blade right, let's have a look at its structure in a close-up view. It has teeth on one side and a smooth straight light on the other. You will want to psi with the cutting teeth facing outward and downwards by how it look on the left-hand side of this picture? The one on the right-hand side has the teeth facing upwards, it won't cut. However, the problem is each tooth is less than one mm white, and we don't have super eyesight to see if they're facing downwards or not. A little trick here to make sure the teeth facing the way we want is that we can have the blade lightly touch our finger. If it can easily slide down the blade, the teeth are facing upwards. If we can feel the pointy teeth on the edge, we know it's facing downwards. Now we have the saw blade facing the right direction. Put one end of the blade into the far clamp and tighten it. Then place the handle against your shoulder and put some pressure on the handle by leaning onto it. Now we can tighten the near clamp. That way, when you release, the saw blade will be tensioned. To test if it is tight, you can lightly pluck the blade. Just like how we do that on a guitar string. When you hear a noise like this from the blade [BACKGROUND] you know it is tight enough and it will cut efficiently. When you use the saw to cut, one way is to move it forward and backwards against our body. However, the hand holding it has to apply pressure all the way pushing the saw downwards to get it work. This can be very tiring if you're cutting things for more than three minutes. The other option is to move the soar upwards and downwards. In this way, the weight of the saw will help us when pulling it downwards. Also do remember how the teeth look like on our saw blade. It will only cut the material when the saw is moving in one direction. In this case, it will cut when the saw moves downwards. With the help of gravity pulling the saw towards the floor. This will actually save you lots of strength during the cutting process. Next, we're going to prepare the surface and get the pencil ready. Here I use an old newspaper to collect the sawdust produced during the cutting process. In this lesson, am doing it on a jolous bench. But before I have this bench setup, I did it on my second hand dining table for the first three years. Basically, you can cut your color pencil on a table, a chair or any flat surface you can find around you. If your pencil has some letters on, such as the brand name, you might want to cut off the words and only use the color parts. The pencil I choose has two colors joined together. I will cut it in half to make two pair starts earrings. One pair in red and one pair in yellow. [MUSIC] Now my pencils are ready. I want each of my pieces to be about six to seven mm. I use the ruler and my scriber to make a mark on seven mm. I make two marks for a pair of my pencil pieces. Here to guide my soberly, I put my thumb next to the place where I need to cut the pencil. [MUSIC] Instead of cutting the pencil all the way through, I rotate the pencil during the cutting process. I will explain why I do this in the problem shooting section. The first piece of the pencil is cut. I need to do the same on my second one. [MUSIC] Again, I keep rotating the pencil when cutting. When I make the yellow pair, I have zoomed out the camera a bit to show you how I hold the pencil tight during the cutting process. This part of the pencil has some words on, so I cut off that section and only keep the color part. Here, I use my thumb and index finger to push the color pencil to the surface I rest on. In this way, my pencil will not move anywhere when I cut it. Now, I have two pairs of color pencils prepared. Each of them is a similar height. They are ready to be cleaned. When grinding the pencil on the sandpaper, I maintain a circular motion and try to apply the pressure evenly. I do this to both sections of the pencil. What I want to achieve is a sharp edge and a smooth surface on both sections. One pencil piece is clean and tidy. I go through the same process for the next three pieces. The two pieces of yellow pencils are more or less at the same height, but for the right pair one is longer than the other. It needs to go back to the sandpaper to have it match the other red one. This actually happen quite often. Now I have two pieces of red pencils at the same height. In the next step, am going to glue the backs on. The glue I use here is the one that jewelers use to glue natural pose onto precious metal. This glue is make of two parts. Once they are mixed thoroughly, the mixture works as superglue. I use a stick to mix the glue, give you the good stuff until the color turns milky white. It's ready to use. If you're not sure whether you or your recipients are allergic to any material, surgical steel is the safest option. However, it's not easy to find surgical steel if you live in a remote area like I do. I have it listed in the project and resources section for you to download. Click the link on the PDF file and you can get them all delivered to your doorstep. When gluing them together, you can put the glue on the pencil and put the earring backed on top. I find it tidier by putting the glue on the flat disc as the glue will take some time to dry. If the air post is not in the center of the pencil, you can easily adjust the position at this stage. Now we leave them to dry for about eight hours. Once the glue is dry, you can put the earring backed on. Here, you have your pencils staked earrings ready. Congratulations, [MUSIC] you have just learnt how to setup a jeweler's saw, how to use the saw efficiently like a pro, also now you know which secret glue we jewelers use to stick paws onto silver, gold and platinum. Don't tell anyone. Its classified. In the next lesson, am going to teach you some basic wire work by showing you how to make color pencil dangle go earrings in two different ways. [MUSIC] 4. Making Color Pencil Dangle Earrings: [MUSIC] Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to make color pencil dangle earrings. As this is a little bit more advanced than the previous lesson, we will need everything in the last project plus a pair of 4 mm pendant cups with pegs and jump rings in sterling silver, a pair of 3.8 mm eye screw for pendant, sometimes it's called screw eye bails, a pair of ear wire in surgical steel, 0.8 mm or 20 gauge sterling silver wire. We will need 20 cm length of this. Make sure this is nickel-free to avoid allergy. Plastic ear backs, a round forming mandrel, a 0.7 mm drill bit, a pair of snip nose pliers or flat nose pliers will work as well as long as the inner surface is flat. A pair of round nose pliers, a pair of shears for wire cutting, and 1.8 mm concave bar. All these tools are listed in the project and resources section. Let's get started. As I promised you that I'm going to show you how to make dangle earrings in two different ways. We need two pairs of color pencils. The pencil I've chosen are in pink and green with a round profile. Just as in the last lesson, here I use a scriber to mark for 7 mm to guide my cutting, and saw pencils just as before. [MUSIC] Great. My four pieces of color pencils are ready for sanding. I found that if I use coarser sandpaper, the surface on the pencil will look very rough. If I use a finer one, it take ages to get a smooth surface. It's about the balance of the finished surface we want to achieve, and the time we want to spend on the sanding process. Ideally, the quicker the better. Three hundred and twenty grits is just the right one in this case for color pencils. Here, I marked the center of the green pair of color pencils with my scriber. Next, I use my 0.7 mm drill bit to hand drill a hole in the center. As the pigment is really soft, you can drill the hole easily freehand like so. To get this started, I carefully drew a whole following the mark. Then I use my ring finger to push the end of the drill and rotate the drill clockwise with my thumb, index, and middle finger. This will drive the drill forward into the pencil with minimum effort. At this stage, make sure not to drill through the pencil. You can see the other end is still nice and smooth. Now I screw the eye bail into the pencil until it's tight. As the hole in the pencil is slightly smaller than the screw on this bail, the pencil will hold the bail tight, keep rotating, and push at the same time until the screw is completely hidden inside of the pencil and only the bail is out. This is how we want it to be. We repeat this on the next pencil to make it to a pair. Now I have a matching pair in lovely apple green. This color always reminds me of spring, a very hopeful color. Next, I'm going to put the pencil onto the surgical steel ear wire. If we push the decorative ball upwards a bit, you will see the loop is actually open. To open it, I push the end to one side. [MUSIC] Apparently it is not big enough to take the bail on the pencil. Let's open it a bit more. [MUSIC] Now the bail with the pencil can easily slide in. To close the loop, I use my snip nose pliers to push it back. With the help of gravity, the tiny opening gap will be covered by the bead above. Ta-da, one dangle earrings is ready. I just need to repeat this on the other pencil. To give you a better look, I have zoom in a bit to show you. I'm pushing the opening to the left-hand side here, but you can push it to the right-hand side, it's totally up to you which way is more convenient. [MUSIC] Here, the dangle earrings in surgical steel are ready. These pre-made ear wires are very handy. They give a very traditional and elegant look to these dangle earrings. However, if you want to have a more contemporary look, you might want to make your own ear wire. In the next step, I'm going to show you another way to make the dangle earring using nickel-free sterling silver. The reason for it being nickel-free is to avoid allergy. When we make jewelry, whenever the material touches the wearer's skin, we need to think about allergies. I will talk about this a bit more in the troubleshooting section. Here, I use the 4 mm pendant cup in sterling silver. As you can see, the cup has a dome shape. To modify it, I use the edge of my snip nose pliers to flatten it like so. You can use the flat nose pliers. As far as the inside is flat, it will do the job. I keep rotating it to make the cup a flat disc. However, I noticed that the jump ring has been bent in the previous stage so I adjusted with my snip nose pliers by carefully bending it back. This is more or less like it. From this angle, the little pack is still not 100 percent aligned with the jump ring. I bend it with my pliers. This is how we want it to be. Now, I repeat the process to the second pendant cup, with a closer up look in case you are watching this on your phone, like I always do. Perfect. This is just right. Flat and centered, the little bails are ready. We move on to prepare the color pencil. I mark the center of the color pencils with my pointy scriber, and then hand drill the holes in the pencil. Let's speed this up to pretend that I can do this super fast. In this step, the key is to make sure the hole is deep enough to take the peg. But we don't want to drill to go through the other end of the pencil. If you're worry, the drill might go too deep and accidentally go through the other end. You can cut the peg a little bit shorter and leave about 3 mm there. The idea of the peg is to maximize the surface area for the glue to quip. In the next step, I put the glue on. As we want as little glue to show on the surface as possible, I put the glue on the peg only. Once this is pushed into the hole, the glue will be squeezed up by the hole to the flat disc and spread out around between the pencil and the flat disc. In this way the glue won't show on the pencil. On the other hand, if I put the glue on the flat disc, the glue will be squeezed out between the disc and the pencil to show a circle of unsightly glue. Here's a picture of how the pencil would look like if we put the glue on the disc. We want it to look like the one on the left-hand side. Nice and clean. When we are waiting for the glue to dry, let's make the ear wire in sterling silver. Move the ruler up and down off the round forming mandrel to find roughly the 12 mm width, and then we can draw a line to mark like this. Next, I wrap around this mark twice to form two full circles. I will overlap this sterling silver wire a bit to make sure I can cut out two full circles. Here, I cut them out with my shears. [MUSIC] I use the round nose pliers to form a hook at the end of the opening like so. These little circles are for hanging the pencils. The opening ends on these circles will go to our ear loops. When the wire was cut by the shears, the end becomes sharp and uneven. We need to round this up to give a smooth touch to our skin. Here, I use this 1.8 mm concave bar to round the end of the wire. I normally use an electric motor to drive the bar. But here, I'm doing it with just my free hand to show that you don't need any complex tool to achieve the same result. Next, we're going to put the pencil on these hooks we just made. Simply hold the end of the opening and push it to one side, slide the hook in, and push the end back to close the circle. Job done. Here is the second pair of dangle earrings in a different style. I normally slide a plastic ear back on each to keep them safe on the ear loop. After all this hard work, we don't want to lose them. [MUSIC] Excellent. You have just learned some basic wire work, top gluing tips and how to drive a drill bit or bar simply with just your free hand. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to give a distress look to our color pencils to get that antique finish, and then use them to make our color pencil necklace. [MUSIC] 5. Making Color Pencil Necklace: Well done for completing the last two lessons. In this one, let's make a necklace. Up to this point you have made matching pairs of pencils. We're going to move on to the next level, working with more than 10 pencil pieces and each of them in a different length. Before we begin, I'm going to quickly run through the extra tools you need in this lesson. One 0.8 mm or 20 gauge silver plated wire with a long profile. This is sold in a row. A rotary drill, such as a Dremel drill, pillow drill, micro mortar, or handpiece with a pendant motor, but if you don't have one, just keep watching. I have a solution for your later in this class. Two of these 2.5 mm crimp beads, one necklace clasp, and a pair of goggles to protect your eyes if you're going to use an electric driven rotary drill. First of all, we're going to cut out a few random color pencils. Choose any color and length that you like. As we're going to approach it in a bit more casual style at this level, we don't need to measure any of them. We want to enjoy a relaxing, creative atmosphere by following our mood to cut the pencils to any length. We want to embrace the beauty of renderness. No need to carefully arrange anything. Just let our feelings guide us. The idea at this stage is to cut as many as you want in any color you would like to have. The more you cut out, the more you will have to choose from in the next step. Now, as we have been cutting for a while, you should have a collection of different color pencils in various lengths. This is exactly what we want. Next, we're going to drill holes through our color pencils. We want each hole to be half cm from one end of the pencil. We don't want to measure it, roughly will be fine. In this way, our necklace will have a casual look. Here I use a drill driven by a pendant motor. The price of such a pendant motor plus the handpiece ranges from $300-$500 roughly £250 or €250 and more. It depends on which brand you choose. If you enjoy working with professional tools, this pendant motor and handpieces are super handy combined with the right drill bit. They can be used to drill through platinum, gold, stainless steel, etc, within minutes. The way to hold such a handpiece is to hold it just as you would hold onto a pencil. When drilling on the pencil, there are two things to watch out for. One, safely first. Make sure you wear a pair of goggles to protect your eyes and make sure your fingers is not on the other side of the pencil opposite the drill. Second, to get a tidy hole, make sure not to drill all the way through the pencil from one side always go about half and turn to the opposite side of the pencil to get the whole through. If you go all the way through, it's possible the paint on the pencil will be cracked by the drill pushing outwards from inside. Here's a picture of the hole drilled in different ways. Sometimes the crack will be bigger than at other times. The results depends on the quality of the wood that your pencil is to make off and how hard you're pushing the drill bit. As we know what we're doing, the holes we drill will always be nice and neat. Here's the way to make sure both holes will meet. Make a mark where your first hole will be drilled, then use your ruler, just rotate the pencil along at the same level to the opposite side and make another mark. This way your holes will meet in the middle. After a while, you'll be able to do this just by eye. It's easy. The wire we use to make the necklace measures 0.8 mm diameter or 20 gauge. The drill bit we choose here is 1.2 mm diameter to make sure the pencils can slide freely along the necklace wire. Obviously, if you have an electric rotary motor or would like to invest in one, that's great, but you don't need these fancy and pricey tools for this project. Let me show you my way to bypass this tool for working with pencils. Remember how we handdrilled the pigment on the pencils in the previous lesson, more or less, we're going to do it in the same way. But the wood is harder than the pigment, simply use our fingers to push the drill bits is not enough. Instead, we put the drill bit on the table like this and put the pencil on top. Next, I use my left hand to push the pencil onto the tip of the drill bit at the same time, I rotate the drill bit with my right hand. In this way, we're using the table to do the job as we use our ring finger to do. When drilling freehand, you don't need to be strong to do this. I'm a tiny teeny person. If I can do this, no problem for you. Again, the trick is to not push the drill all the way through, go roughly halfway and then drill from the opposite side to get the hole through. In this way, you are in full control. As we have finished drilling all the pencils we have chosen, next, we're going to smooth the rough sections and sharp edges with our sandpaper. Instead of aiming for a complete flat section, I want the pencil to have a worn look. I lightly grind the section on the sandpaper to take the sharp edge off this pencil. I till the edge too have it touch the sandpaper and rotate it at the same time. Here, this side of the pencil has a worn look, uneven, but smooth to touch. We need to do this to the other side of this pencil and to the rest of our collection. If you want a bit of a distress antique look, use the sandpaper to wear away some of the paint randomly. Now, our pencils are well-prepared. Let's lay them out in the way we want them to be and then we move on to get our necklace wire ready. First, we need to decide how long we want our necklace to be. This is a picture of a general guide for choosing your necklace length. Obviously, just like clothes, a size medium will be big for some people, but just right for others. You will have to adjust accordingly whichever length you choose. We need to add about two cm or an inch to each end for us to make the loop at the end of our necklace and to put a clasp on. For instance, if you want to make an 18 inch necklace, you will need a 20 inch long wire. Now we need to make a loop at both ends of our wire. First, I slide a quick bead on to the wire, then mark two cm or one inch in from the end. Using our round nose pliers, we place the wire about a quarter of the way down the pliers and bend the wire to the left and right, just so forming a circle about three mm in diameter. Taking the end of the pliers, I gently hold on the joint and bend the wires back like this so that the wires are roughly at 90 degrees from each other. Now, holding the circle with the flat nose pliers, I pinch the ends together, mixed. You just need to slide the beads over both ends of the wire. You will need to pinch it to an oval shape to get it to go over the other wire and tied up to the circle. Now, lock it into place by flattening it with the pliers. Snip off the extra length with your shears so that it won't scratch your skin. Now, slide all your pencils onto the wire in the order we lay out earlier. Repeat this on the other end of the wire, but before you push the bead over both ends, slide your clasp into the hoop before closing and locking the bead. Here's your necklace done. [MUSIC] What an achievement. By creating antique looking pencils and using them to make your very own necklace, you have just learned more basic wire work, how to drill holes on wood efficiently with a rotary drill or even with just freehand. Give yourself a pat. Coming up, I'm going to share with you some troubleshooting tips from my bench. In this way, even this is your first time working with color pencils, it will save you lots of hustle by knowing the firsthand solution from my experience of making color pencil jewelry for over 10 years. [MUSIC] 6. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] Well done. You have make it through all the lessons. Thank you so much for taking my class. I hope you have enjoyed it. You have learned some basic jewelry making skills through the arts of color pencil jewelry making. You now know how to set up and use a jeweler saw, how to apply jewelers glue, some drilling techniques, how to assemble finished jewelry without hot soldering, some basic wire work, and you also know that you need to take allergic reaction into account when making jewelry. More importantly, if there is one thing I hope you can take away from this class is that, don't let a lack of professional equipment stop you. There is always a workaround. I hope this class inspires you to create your own color pencils jewelry, or even starts you on your jewelry making journey. There are so many color pencil choices out there. Enjoy the making process and explore the possibilities. If you have made some pencil jewelry, I would love to see your creations. You can post your work to the project gallery on the class page here on Skillshare. If you found this class useful, please leave a review. For any questions, do post on the Discussion section. Make sure to follow me on Skillshare to stay informed of my upcoming classes. If you're interested in seeing me making jewelry or footage of behind the scenes, you can find me on my YouTube channel by going to my Skillshare profile. Or if you would like to check out the jewelry I have created, please visit my Etsy site at huiyitan.etsy.com. It has been my great pleasure to meet you on this wonderful platform. Until next time. [MUSIC]