Hi there, Sandy here.
Welcome to another polymer clay jewelry video at KeepsakeCrafts.net.
In part 1 of this two part series, I showed you how to make polymer clay toggles that
are actually focal points in pendants for necklaces.
Today I'm going to show you how to take your toggle and toggle bar and turn them into a
necklace.
So here's the toggle that I showed you how to make last week and obviously it's not going
to go around the back of the neck as just a basic clasp.
This is a focal point.
It's just a fun way of using findings in a different way.
And here's the other one that I showed you that is all completed into a necklace.
It's really rather fun with just some beads and beaded chain and the toggle has dangles
hanging off of it and it uses a combination of your jewelry making techniques.
So I'm sure you can imagine the first thing I did was went through all my beads and chose
the colors that I wanted to go with it.
Now for this one, I went with these rose quartz beads and then also bright silver and some
sparkle to go with the little rhinestones that are in the flower centers.
So I went with bright silver here, but for this one, the first thing I chose were these
crystals, which are kind of a smokey color, but they have the purple in them and then
I decided from there to kind of focus on grays.
So I have some gun metal type spacers, some gun metal hearts which I thought were really
cute.
Some brighter silver hearts, but they're not too bright and then just a few leopard skin
jasper beads.
I also pulled out some purple Swarovskis.
I just had a whole bunch of kind of odds and ends of Swarovskis in purple.
Then I pulled out these fuchsia beads because there is the fuchsia in the little flowers
that we put on the toggle and I thought they might be pretty.
What was interesting is I have these in 6mm and 4mm and the 6mm were just way too much,
too strong, but look what happens when I just sprinkle some of the 4mm in there.
They just look really pretty.
They add some pops of color and really tie it all in together.
So what I want to have is somewhere around 16" of beads and that's where one of these
bead design boards is fantastic because I can look at it and get some pretty good approximate
measurements.
Now what I want to do is actually mix all these up.
I also chose some chain, but we'll use that in a minute.
You'll find these little plastic scoops in the jewelry section of your craft store.
I should do a Friday Findings video on them because although they seem very basic, they
come in a set of three, they are wonderful.
It was a stocking stuffer my husband gave me a couple years ago and I use them all the
time.
They're just really useful.
So what I'm going to do is take all of these beads and I'm going to put them on one of
these little velour beading mats.
This is my method for mixing up beads.
I could sometimes be really, I don't know, just a little too concerned about mixing things
up and getting them spaced just right.
So I try to do it so it comes out a little more random.
I'm going to fold this velour piece in half and just
send all these beads out into one channel of my bead design board.
Now this might not work to completely randomize them because some are heavier than others
so you may end up with more on one end, but I found it helps.
Like I said, if you're too much of a control freak when it comes to randomizing things,
you might find it helps to do it this way.
Okay, I'm really loving these little pops of fuchsia and the Swarovski sparkle.
I think that's great.
This is looking somewhere around 20" of beads.
So then I'm going to go and cut myself a nice long piece of bead stringing wire.
If this is 20", I'm going to cut this about 30" because this will actually be two pieces
of bead stringing wire.
I'm going to add a bead stopper to one end and then just string all of these onto my
wire.
So I've strung all my beads on.
I really love the look of this, the gray with the pinks and the lavendar and the fuchsia.
Very happy with that.
Now it's time to make a hole in your pendant and you can see I did that on this one.
What I used to go through that hole is this.
It's actually a very fine coil of very fine wire.
It's called french wire and I've done a Friday Findings video on it and you buy it like this,
just in a length and it's a coil you can use to cover bead stringing wire and it helps
protect it and it's just a really nice finish.
So I'm just going to take a little 1/8" drill bit.
This goes into a chuck of a power drill, but you can drill polymer clay very easily by
hand and I'm going to start by deciding where I want my hole and I want it kind of centered
on this lobe which is a little close to this flower.
Make sure you don't have it too close to the edge or you might blow that out.
So I'm going to have it about here.
It's always a good idea to start it with an awl.
You don't have to press real hard, but just make a little point to start and that will
keep your drill bit in place and then I put my drill bit in there and just drill out that
hole.
Like I said, polymer clay drills really easily by hand and I like to go back through the
other side and sometimes kind of move it back and forth while you're twirling it just to
clean out the hole.
And I've got my french wire here.
This is a coil of wire so if you pull on it or yank on it you'll distort it and stretch
it out.
Just like a little itty bitty Slinky.
So do be careful with it.
So I've got the long end of my string of beads here and the first thing I need to do is put
on a crimp.
Next I'm just going to go ahead and slide this through the hole to figure out how much
I need.
This protects not only your wire, but it protects your polymer clay and keeps your wire from
eventually cutting through the clay someday and it keeps your wire from being abraded
as it goes back and forth.
In this case though, I think the clay would probably be the thing to lose.
This french wire as I mentioned in the Friday Findings video comes in different diameters.
This one is .9mm so it's just right.
So if you have different sized drill bits and different sized holes you may have to
coordinate that.
Now I'm just going to put the wire back through the crimp.
It may take a little bit of fiddling and finagling.
What you eventually want is a nice tear drop of your french wire looped through the hole
of your polymer clay piece.
I won't torture you with making you watch me fumble.
There we go!
And now I'm going to use my One Step Crimper to crimp that crimp.
You can leave a little bit of room for a crimp cover.
This is probably one of the more fiddle-y parts of the whole operation as you can tell
and I'm kind of a fumble fingers.
Make sure you give it a tug!
You don't want to go losing your pendant and your whole string of beads here so always
give it a tug.
That's looking nice and secure.
Trim off that extra end of short wire and I have some kind of cool gun metal corrugated
crimp covers here and I don't use crimping pliers for the crimping.
I love my One Step Crimper for that, but I do use crimping pliers to pick up the crimp
cover because it holds it perfect without making things difficult.
Just slide that over your squashed crimp and press it gently and now I'm going to slide
down half of my beads and slide the other half down to the bead bug that's here and
then the remaining wire I'll just cut in about half.
Definitely had plenty of extra and put a bead clamp.
I'm going to put a clamp on this end cause I drop these things and I spent all that time
stringing it.
I don't want to have to do it again.
So we'll set that aside for the other side and here's the chain I've chosen to go around
the back.
And then this you can put through some more of your french wire.
Always a crimp first and then because this is just going around a bit of chain, I don't
have to measure it like I did here because it was a really thick piece and I wasn't sure
how much I needed.
I'm going to cut off about 3/16".
Somewhere around 6mm-7mm if you're not doing measurements, but the more sensible millimeters
I think.
There's that.
That goes through one end link of your chain and just like on the other side, it goes back
through the crimp.
Pull it up and fiddle with it until you have a nice tear drop of your french wire.
Leave a little room for a crimp cover, crimp it and add your crimp cover.
So there's that side I've strung on.
And now we're going to make the dangles that come off our toggle and one thing I forgot
to mention is that you should set aside some of your beads that you think will work nicely
for the toggle.
On this one I used these little pressed glass hearts and some of the other sparkle silver
in the chain.
I actually forgot to set some aside and ended up having to restring this, pull some off
and restring them.
And you just want some head pins and whatever other beads you want to make dangles.
So we'll do some of these crystals and I've got a few of these small beads.
So just string yourself three little dangles.
They don't have to be particularly long, 1/2" or 1" at the most because we're going to put
them on chain to make them really dangly.
So you can see I've strung my dangles and now I'm going to use the One Step Looper to
make them into dangles, but you can also use round nose pliers and wire cutters to make
loops.
If you want to learn more about this awesome tool, the One Step Looper, which just, you
can see how fast this is, it just makes this process really fast.
You really ought to know how to make a good loop, simple loop with round nose pliers and
wire cutters, but this is great when you have a lot to do.
It just speeds up the process.
And I have some chain for my dangles and you've seen me use this trick before where I'm not
going to cut the chain off of the long length.
I'm going to leave it long.
Use chain nose pliers to open up that loop I just made and pop on the end link of my
chain and then make sure to close up that loop nice and securely.
And it's up to you how long you make your dangles.
I'll make them a few inches, just like this one.
Maybe 3" at the longest.
Whatever looks good and looks right in proportion to your pendant.
So I'll just kind of look at that and say, "Okay, that one's going to be about that long."
Grab my pliers and I could have twisted open that link, but I didn't feel like messing
with it.
Repeat for all of your dangles and you can have one, you can have three, you can have
12.
It's up to you.
Three is a nice number though.
And here I'm ready to finish up the third one and you notice I just kind of positioned
them down here on my work space and try to get them all slightly different lengths.
I think it just makes it look a lot more interesting.
Just grab that with my pliers and chomp it somewhere.
Real precise.
Okay, now we have our dangles made and the next thing is to make a hole in the toggle
bar.
Easily done again with the drill bit.
Start with the awl, the center is good, and make a hole.
We're almost ready to string on our toggle bar, but there's a few things I figured out
along the way that we need to do first.
I'll show you on this one.
See that my toggle bar has several small beads right after the toggle and that's so that
when I put it through the pendant and then it hangs, that's what's going around the back
and it's a much more neater finish.
You can see I finished with just one of those beads peeking out.
It lays nice and flat and even.
If I were to have some of these beads, it would just be kind of lumpy.
So what you want to do is you've got your beads that are going to go around one side
of the necklace.
You want to just string on probably 5-6 smallish beads, 2-3mm.
So once you get all the small beads on, go ahead and come through the back side of your
toggle and then just hold onto that.
Or put a bead clamp on if you don't trust yourself to hold it securely, which sometimes
I don't.
And just test it.
And maybe I'll take one of those off.
So five seems to be just about right, these little beads.
Now I'm going to put on a crimp and the end links of the chain of all of my dangles.
Now that bead stringing wire goes back through the crimp.
If you want to here, you could use a wire protector although it may not fit through
the links of chain.
I chose a bead stringing wire whose color I don't mind seeing a little bit of here and
that's probably the easiest way to do it.
So then just go ahead and use your One Step Crimper or crimping tool.
Flatten that crimp.
Always test.
It's just so much easier to fix it now than if it falls apart while you're wearing it
or if you're making it to sell and it falls apart on a customer.
Not good.
So always just test it and a nice little crimp cover gives it a great finish.
And there's that end.
And now you just finish this end the same way with a crimp, a little bit of french wire
or a wire protector.
Then you can check it out, test it out and see how long you want it to be.
Add a clasp at some point in here.
Just break up the chain and add a clasp and your necklace is done.
Made with your own very unique polymer clay toggle pendant.
And yes, it has two closures.
A clasp in the back and the toggle in the front.
Only because the toggle in the front to me is just decorative and interesting, but I
do like to make my pieces adjustable so they're just the right length for what I'm wearing.
So I hope you've benefited and found this video helpful and inspiring and encouraging
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So happy creating!
Bye bye.