Mastering Necklace Design with Bead Design Board

Do you ever wake up and you've been dreaming about beads? I do. Last week it was these silver foil twist beads. I just couldn't get them out of my head. So when I got up I decided I needed to think about what I would like to make with them. Hi my name is Carol and welcome to my channel. It's lovely to have you here with me today. So I decided that I needed to make something with these silver twist beads and I thought I'd share my process with you of how I go about designing a necklace. So I used my design, my bead design board and I laid out the beads and I've recorded that process for you so that you can follow along and maybe learn how to design your own necklaces. So let's get started. I'm going to show you today how I design a necklace using my bead design board. As I said I've been quite obsessed with the green twist beads and thinking about them quite a lot. So I thought that I would start there with these beads here and I also have this pendant which goes quite well with the green beads. So they're similar colours. So that was where I started and then I just chose some beads. So I'll just go through what I've got here and I'll leave a description in the description box below of what we actually use by the time we finish the necklace. These ones are 18 by 15 and they're lampwork glass foil twists. I've got some 10 millimetre faceted round glass beads. I have some 10 millimetre silver filigree beads. I've got some six millimetre silver balls. I've got some eight millimetre gold balls and of course I've got my Murano pendant. As well I have some flush cutters and I have my chain nose pliers and over here I've got some crimp beads. I've got a clasp, a toggle clasp and I've got some silver tiger tail. So let's zoom in and we can get started making this necklace. So here's my twist beads and as you can see they go quite well with my pendant. So that was the basis of the of the design. I thought these go really well and this pendant it has some gold in it and it also has some silver. So that's why I chose to use gold and silver beads. Now I'm not 100% sure whether I will use the gold but we'll see how we go. Now when I'm starting to make a pendant what I do is I decide first how big I want the pendant, the necklace to be. I'm going to go up to the 10 mark on either side so my tiger tail will needs to be longer than the 10 on each side. What I do next is I start at the centre so I've popped my pendant here on zero and then I decide what I would like to do. So I think I'll start by laying in my favourite beads the green ones and I just work on either side popping some in deciding how many I need. I think we might start with eight so I've got four on either side. Now I'm going to think about what I would like to put on either side of those beads and I think these filigree silver ones might look quite nice on either side. So maybe something like that because the silver goes really nicely with the silver foil inside the beads. What do you think? I'll do the other side. Okay so I quite like that idea. Now I need to figure out I need to figure out next what I want to put in between these because I think that that would be quite boring if it was just like this. I feel like it needs something between the filigree beads. Now I could actually take that filigree bead away and put a silver one there but that kind of gets lost. What if I put a gold one? Not really loving that either. So I've got these big green ones here so pop that one back. What if I put a green one between the two filigrees? And this is literally how I design my necklaces or any piece of jewelry really. It's just trial and error. You take things away and you put them back until you decide you have what you want. Now I seem to have this uneven so maybe I have not got enough beads on this side. So I've got one, two, three, four on that side. One, two, three, four. Yes I have. I just need to close them up a bit. So I quite like that but it feels a bit closed in to me so I'm going to try the silver beads on either side of these green round ones. Just make some room. So what if I put a silver bead on either side? I quite like that. Looks not there. Now the beauty of a design board is obviously that you can do this. You can move things around and just make room for things and it's just trial and error and it's really great that you can do that with your design board. And obviously you don't want to go over the length that you want your necklace to be so you've got it all laid out there. Now I'm giving myself a little bit of space here but when I thread my beads they will be closed up so they will be still within that 10. I quite like that. I need something for the centre here and because I've got the filigree beads in the centre I think I'll put a couple of the small balls like that. Now they're kind of disappearing I haven't got any of these gold balls in there but I don't think I need them. Let's have a look. So I could put a gold ball next to just move everything down in there because I do quite like the whole mixed metal thing which you probably know if you've watched some of my videos before. To be honest I'm not loving it with the gold so I might take them out. Okay so no gold just silver that's okay and I do really like this but I'm concerned that because my pendant has a rather large hole in it that my beads in the middle here are going to disappear inside there so I might add an extra bead in there. Sometimes what you can do is you can actually sit a bead inside which will work really well in this instance. So what do you think? I think I'm ready except that it's not long enough so what I'm going to do is just fill the space with these silver balls. I really don't like to have big beads around the back of my neck so I often do this I often use smaller beads at the back because they well they actually irritate me so I tend to use a smaller bead at the back and also it's quite you know these beads are expensive versus these beads which aren't so it cuts down the cost of making your jewelry too. How many have I got there? One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five. I thought I had one less. Now it's not quite at the ten so I'll just add some more. Okay so now you can see I've reached my ten. Actually I haven't on this side so what's going on because it's not quite centered and I think it's just that it's not quite centered on the board I hope so I'll just move everything up a bit and see how I go. Oh yes I see where the problem is. So my beads down here are scrunched up a little bit. There we go. All right so I'm quite happy with that so now I'm going to go ahead and thread it and onto my tiger tail and see where we go from there. So to do that now normally when I'm threading a necklace if I'm not using my design board I start in the middle but I'm actually going to just start at the end. I'm going to put my first bead on and I'm actually going to thread the tiger tail back through there because I don't have my bead stopper. Obviously you could put a bead stopper on here and I'm just going to thread it so that it stops the beads falling off and then I'm just going to go and thread on the rest of the beads starting at the top. The good thing about this is that it makes it and I'm at the pendant now I'm just I've just laid it back on the board just to make sure that it does reach the 10. So you can see there it's exactly the right size there so that's what I wanted. Now I've got to put on this pendant. So remember I said that I would put the bead inside the pendant so I'm going to thread that one on first and then I'm going to put on my pendant and what I'm doing is I'm just popping that bead inside that pendant so that it's nice and firm hopefully that will keep it nice and centered on the necklace so it doesn't fly around. And the other thing I found when I was threading is these filigree beads sometimes the tiger tail does not want to go straight through the hole and it'll come through another hole in the bead for example. You can see there I've got it off center so it's these are a little bit trickier to thread but you get there in the end. Okay I'm just going to thread on the rest of my beads now. Okay I've threaded on all the beads and you can see that it is actually a little long so now that the beads are all closed up I'm just actually going to make sure that they are closed up because I can see there's a little space at the bottom and I think that will take up that slack. So just pushing all the beads down and now they are exactly on ten so that's exactly what I wanted and now I'm going to get rid of my beadboard and I'm going to carry on putting on the clasp. Okay so now it's time to put my clasp on and I'm going to do that by putting on a crimp bead so I'm going to take my crimp bead and notice I'm putting it down on the table to pick it up it just makes it easier rather than trying to thread it on. And I have a problem. My crimp bead is going to go through the hole in the bead so I'm actually going to put a little bead there to stop that happening. So I'll just unthread that and I've got a couple of little four millimeter ones here. I might pop one of those on and that way I can, it should stop that crimp bead going down inside. Now it will add a little bit of length obviously to the necklace but it's only eight millimeters so I'm not really worried about that. If you were worried about that you could take off one of these eight millimeter beads, sorry six millimeter beads. Okay so there I've got my little filigree bead on and it kind of goes with the filigree beads here so that looks good. Because I'm right-handed I'm going to put on the this when I put the necklace on, if I turn it that way, this piece will be in my left hand and so it means that for me I'm going to put the bar on this hand. It's not so important with this type of clasp but with a lobster claw clasp I would definitely want to have the clasp part on this side because that's my dominant hand. Okay let's try that again, put a crimp bead on, putting it down on the table, threading it through and I'm going to And there's my crimp bead sitting where it should be this time and I'm just going to go back through my crimp bead and down through the filigree bead and through another one of those silver beads. I don't like to cut my thread, my tiger tail, really close to my crimp so that's what I have because it just gives me that added sense of security that it's not going to pop out of my crimp bead so that's why I've threaded it down through a couple of the beads. So what I'm going to do next is I'm actually going to give that crimp bead a squeeze using my pliers. So taking my pliers and just giving it a really good tough squeeze so that I'm flattening it. So that's what I have and then I'm going to cut off this end making sure obviously it's the short end and don't worry about that end because if it's there it will just go down inside the beads and it will be hidden. Just make sure it does go down inside the beads otherwise it will poke out. So that's the first side done and now I'm going to put on the second part of the clasp. I had put the tiger tail through the bead twice to hold the beads on so I'm just going to unthread that just like that and I'm just going to run my fingers right down the length of the necklace just to make sure that everything is nicely together so there's no gaps you don't want that. All right so next I need to put on my other the other end of my clasp and I'm going to do that oh first though I need to put on that little bead don't I to stop my crimp bead disappearing so I'll do that first. Okay and then I'm going to pop on my crimp bead and my clasp and back down through my crimp bead. Okay so that's what I have and now I'm going to go through the back through that filigree bead and down through one of the other beads. Now with this end I want to make sure I don't have any gaps so I'm just going to pull it nice and tight so that all the beads are pushed up against each other but that I have enough room for that clasp to be easily movable because there's nothing worse than having a clasp that is the target tail is so tight that it can't move so I've left a little bit of space there. All right now obviously I need to crimp this bead so taking my chain nose pliers and just giving it a good squeeze so that it's nice and flat and now I'm just going to trim off the end and there's my necklace. So I hope you've enjoyed this design process with me and and that you've learned something that's always my mission to teach you something basically it's just a matter of trial and error so you try a bit and you try things if you don't like them you take them apart and then you try again. The design board makes it really easy to do that because you haven't strung on a whole lot of beads and then have to unstring them again you can just play with them on the board and get them in the design that you would like. If you enjoyed this video please subscribe to my channel and like the video and of course ring the bell so you'll be notified every time that I upload new videos you'll never miss a thing. It was great to have you along for the ride today. Thanks for watching and have a great day.