DIY Jewelry- Easy Seed Bead Necklace- Great For Beginners)

Hey guys, Melissa here and in this video I want to show you how I made this seed bead necklace. This is my own personal necklace that I've made myself. I don't have an extender on it at the perfect length for me. If I'm making them myself, I'll put an extender on. I'll make them about 16 inches with an extender. I use a bunch of different types of seed beads. Mine's neutral colored, but then I have a sterling silver square bead mixed in to give it some character. But it's very simple, but I just love these and people love them too. If you want to see how I make them, stay tuned and I'll show you how. All right, for this project you're going to need some beading wire of course. I grabbed some 21 strand. I usually use 49, but these sterling silver accent beads that I'm going to use from Fire Mountain Gems, the holes aren't very big, so I have to use beading wire to accommodate that. I grabbed a nine by six lobster clasp. I like these because they're slim. These necklaces I make with seed beads are pretty small, so I don't want anything bulky on the end of it. I grabbed some two inch extender chain. This is optional. You can buy ready-to-use extender chains online. This one has a jump ring on it already, which is convenient. You can get bulk chain and make your own if you'd like. All right, so I've got two crimps. I've got my sterling silver accent beads of course. Tools. I got my crimping pliers and a couple other pliers as well for the jump rings and some flush cutters for the bead wire. Seed beads. In this bag I have a whole variety of seed beads. A large percentage is black. The rest are neutral colored. Some metallics. They're size 11. There's a lot of opaque matte seed beads in there. I just bought a bunch of colors that I really liked and I thought would go well together and I threw them all in a bag together. So when I string them it's all going to be random. Oh and really important too is I use a bead mat. This mat is helpful for beads, especially seed beads, so they don't get away from you. So I'm gonna pour a bunch of seed beads out of my mat. I'm gonna grab a length of my bead wire. I want my necklace to be about 16 inches, so I'm gonna cut off about 18 inches just to be on the safe side. All right, first thing we do is feed on a crimp. Feed the end through. Pull it through until I get a little loop. I leave a little tail in hopes to feed those through the first beads that I feed on my wire. I go ahead and crimp. Do the inner one first to make it into a kidney bean shape and then I come through to the front hole and smash it further. And I give it a nice smush. Sometimes I get a sharp edge. I'll come through with my flush cutters and kind of cut a slight bit off. Sometimes you might have to file it. You don't want any sharp edges scratching anybody, so kind of trim that off until it's smooth. Okay, so I'm gonna start feeding on my seed beads. Throw some sterling silver out there as well and then I start feeding on my seed beads. And I usually have about an inch and a quarter in between my sterling silver beads, which equals out to be about 22 size 11 seed beads. So how I feed on my seed beads, I just randomly go through at the end of my wire and feed them on. Just random colors. I count up to 22. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. I'll do like 11 at a time. When you get to the end here, kind of feed your tail through as many beads as you can. This guy, I'm just going to trim it right there. Okay, so I got 11. Let's put 11 more. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. And feed on. Those holes are tiny. I usually try to get some sterling silver beads with larger holes, but that's what I have to work with. So there's a length of seed beads and a sterling silver bead. And I just keep repeating this pattern until I'm done. Okay, so I'm noticing I'm getting towards the end here. So I'm going to feed on another sterling silver bead, one last one, and then do a row of seed beads, and then I'm going to finish off my necklace. All right, so here we are at the end. Got about an inch left. I'm going to feed on my last crimp bead. Oh, and a tool I forgot to mention at the beginning that comes in handy is a clamp. Just so things don't ride up, I kind of clamp, gently clamp my bead wire right above the crimp bead so it doesn't ride up. Feed that back down, make sure it goes down the center of the seed beads. And I take my crimp, make that first crimp, take my clamp off, and then finish it off. All right, that's smooth. Come down the other end, that's smooth too. Good. All we need to do now is attach our lobster clasp and then our extender chain and then we'll be done. Open that up, feed that on, make sure it's closed. Go to the other side. This rings teeny weeny. You're probably thinking seed beads probably take forever to make, but they only take like 15-20 minutes to make so that's not too bad. And if you're using sterling silver, make sure you charge accordingly. Here's some other examples. Well, here's a solid color with some random round sterling silver beads, sterling silver extender, and lobster clasp. What's nice about these is I got this mini pendant here. Teeny tiny guy. Slip this right on. Nice necklace to hold your little silver pendants. There's that one and I also made this copper one with bronze beads, copper beads. They're very unique and there's so many different varieties you can make. You can also triple them up, make three strands, attach them to the same jump rings and have a triple strand of a variation. Like you can have one solid black, one black with sterling, and you can have one totally different color. So that's it for me guys. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. If you have any questions, leave me a comment. 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