Go to www.beadaholique.com to purchase beading supplies and to get design ideas!
Hi this is Becky Nunn of Nunn Design
and I'm a guest designer for Beadaholique.com and today I'm gonna be
showing you a fun project
what you can do with odd shaped findings that
you might already have in your own stash including buttons with
shanks on the back or maybe just pieces that are too big to fit in any of the
bezels that you might have.
This is the project that we will be making with some vintage finds
of these buttons that I had in my own personal stash and so what you'll be
needing for this
are your personal stash, you'll be needing some
ear wires, some mini links,
some crystals and some crystal clay.
Inside of the crystal clay comes with this handy beeswax toothpick
the first step is going to be taking
equal size balls of the crystal clay
and in the package you want to read the manufacturer's instructions
you want to put your gloves on during this mixing process
so once you have two equal size balls
go ahead and knead them together until
they are no longer marbled and depending on how many times you've used
your gloves
I've used these a couple times. It starts getting stickier and stickier and might be
a little bit
challenging but just bear with, it
doesn't last very long. You just go ahead
and mix the clay until it's no longer marbled
sometimes if my clay is super hard
like maybe I didn't wrap it up as well as I should of because these all
come in little
saran wrap containers
and then they have a little sticky thing to keep them
nice and moist inside of they're airtight containers but if you didn't do
it
what you can do is put it into a little ziplock and put it into some
warm running water and that will make it soft again
so you don't have to work your fingers out
too much, kneading them together
this is what it should look like when it's all mixed and it's no longer marbled
Once you have your clay mixed, you want to do a little bit of
guesstimating. I'm guesstimating
that I need a ball about that size to go inside of
my mini link. I was totally wrong so I can go ahead and pinch off even a
smaller size ball
sometimes you know it just
really takes time to get a gauge of
how much clay you'll need so
its best to always under mix your clay
I think you can always add more to it but
if you want to watch a great video on how to use your excess clay
you can do that on Beadaholique.com as well. So I've just taken a small bit of it
and I pinched it off and pressed it inside
of the bezel and sometimes
I can get clay on these outside edges, this kind of a groove area
it looks neat but sometimes it's not so great with crystal clay getting stuck
inside of there
so I always have a handy wet wipe
right beside where I'm working so that I can wipe away
that excess clay on my piece. I'm also just making sure that my
fingers
are nice and clean too so that I don't get clay all over the back side
or anywhere else that I don't want to clay. So I pressed a little bit in
and as you can see my found piece that I wanted to embed
this has a shank that I could not cut off in anyway
I'm gonna press it inside of the clay
and as you can see I have a little bit of a gap and that's what this video is
about
it's about how do you clean up
or make attractive something that is too big or too large
or won't go all the way in there and how we're going to do that
is by snaking out a bit on the clay to go around the outside
edge and then we're gonna put the crystals on top of that.
Once you have that into position you're gonna take some more of the clay
that you might have
handy if not then you'll go ahead make up some more
and I'm just snaking it out into a nice
not too thick this time
was gonna go ahead and kinda, I'm pulling on it a little bit
and then I'm going to take it and start to
push it down inside of that little crevice that I had
that I wanted to fill up
and I'm trying to keep it consistent as best as I can
and I'm pulling on this clay as I wrap it around
see if you break it no big deal, just kinda put it back where it was
squish it down a wee bit and then just continue to go around until you get
to the other
end and once you get to the other end you're just gonna pinch off
a little teeny bit that I had leftover
and then
blend that little seam right there
you can also use your toothpick to
blend it together too. So once I have my clay
in position, I'm going to go ahead
and pat it down and I'm pressing it down
into that gapped area
just trying to make it as nice and even and smooth as I can
this is what it looks on the topside, this is what it looks like
from the side. So once I have my clay kinda snaked out and inside of there
you can try different size stones to see which ones that you like
the best. Let's see how this one works
So did you see how I did that when I was picking up those crystals. Sometimes
they're turned over
so I'm using my beeswax toothpick
to flip them over and then pick it up on the front so that
pointy part is facing down
now this is the part where I have to put on my dorky glasses
thank goodness I'm in a video. I can no longer see this sort of level of detail
and this dark stone on a dark clay makes it kind of challenging
and then you just keep on going all the way around
I probably could have used a little less clay
but if I was using a larger size chaton
then that would of have been
really nice inside of there
these are super super tiny
so if you can imagine you could have extra size
big buttons that maybe don't fit inside
of a bezel or maybe you have some crystals
I have tons vintage cabs that I
just collected from garage sales
I don't know about you guys but once somebody knows that you're like a beader
you like this kinda stuff, they start like giving you bags of
junk that they don't want anymore that's broken, I know everybody has that
personal stash
that is what is so great about being
a crafter, is that you get to utilize all that stuff that you
would of have otherwise, somebody probably just would have been done loving with
but you can bring it to life
in a fun little piece and it also gives meaning to
pieces that you might
want to give to somebody else. It's like
you remember that really cool pair of earrings that you loved so much that you couldn't
use anymore
because you lost the one, well I made you a fun little one
and you'll be a
superhero, then everybody will be bringing you junk and wanting you to make
stuff and then the next thing you know you'll be making a bunch of pieces.
Yahoo! So as you see I'm just pressing them in there
and I'm not pressing them in there too terribly deep
at first because it's really hard once you start getting
cattywomped sticking them down in too hard
it kind of bends the clay on both sides. You're just pressing them down there very nicely
and then I'm gonna come back in and press it down a little bit harder
and so I'm totally embedding them down into the clay
you see what I mean
they are a little bit high and now I'm pressing them down inside the
clay
so I'm also being really careful, I'm just noticing
that I'm having a little bit of
the beeswax come off on the crystals and that shows up a lot on the darker
stones, it's not so much on the crystal
but you see a little extra residue right there
don't worry about that, when it's cured
to be about two hours, it'll be fully cured at fourteen but it'll be cured as
far as
you won't be able to embed anything else inside of it
you can take a wet wipe and then wipe away that excess. Now if I wanted to
I could of brought that clay all the way down to the base and done
three rows of these crystals and brought this crystal up
a little higher on these other pieces that I did
I hardly put any crystal clay inside of there so I have a nice
even clean edge right there
and I think the clay was maybe even a different color
can't remember when I did that but you can see the difference of
a lot of clay which gives it a nice looking itself and then no clay
or very little clay, just filling up that gap.
Once your piece is secured, I let it sit for
at least a couple hours because you won't have any risk of having the
crystals pop out. You're gonna want assemble it and I'm using some lever
back
earring wires and I'll need to create
a way in which to hang properly.
So I have one small jump ring and one medium sized jump ring
you're welcome to use whatever jump rings you might already have whether
they're small and small but you will need to have two
and so I just threaded that on
and then I'm using my needle nose pliers
to bring to a close and then I'm going to thread on
my other jump ring on both sides
first that one and since
this is going to be the front. I'm thinking about
how my earring pendant is going to go on. It's going to go on
this way, see how that worked and
I'm going to close that up and we have a beautiful
earring using
some found pieces that you might have in your own personal stash
Here are some other examples
of using pieces that you might have in your stash that are just too big for the
bezels
or in some cases too small for the bezels and this one
I did the same thing that we saw earlier. I snaked out that side
and put it in. That's pretty cool.
I did it right here in the necklace piece as well
and two reference how to make fun beads
using bead caps and crystal clay
like these samples here, you can see another Beadaholique video for that one.
Here the crystal was way too
small and was also super high so
I put the crystal clay into the base. I put the crystals all the way around the
outside
and then pressed the stone into the center and did a matching
to create a fun little set.
Go to www.beadaholique.com to purchase beading supplies and to get design ideas!