Making a carnelian pendant

Technique Tuesday!

This pendant necklace that I showed you yesterday was fashioned from a bola tie slide and some left-over beads from various vintage necklaces. Start by removing the slide finding from the back of the focal piece and sanding down the rough spots if necessary. Next, if there isn’t a hole through which you can fit a jump ring, drill one at the top of your piece. Mine didn’t have a hole, of course, but that was just a good excuse to use our drill press. Be really careful when you’re drilling unknown materials…you never know when something might shatter, so always wear eye protection.Gather up some beads that go nicely with your focal piece. I used some beads from 4 or 5 different necklaces here. The one style that I had enough of, I used to create the necklace strand. They are resin beads that look like polished wood. The rest are a mixture of resin and glass. I love how lightweight the resin beads are…you can get a lot of bulk and movement without a lot of added weight.

I started with a split ring in the middle of the beaded strand so that it wouldn’t slip off the beading wire. From there, I hung 4 jump rings in a chain, with the last jump ring attaching to the pendant.

Since the holes in resin beads are sometimes rather large, I slipped a seed bead onto each headpin, followed by the resin or glass bead. Create a wrapped loop at the top. Arrange the bead dangles the way you desire, and attach each of them to the jump ring chain. To make the cluster of beads fuller, attach some of them to additional jump rings that will attach to the chain.

Copyright 2008 Cyndi Lavin. Not to be reprinted, resold, or redistributed for profit. May be printed out for personal use or distributed electronically provided that entire file, including this notice, remains intact.