Beaded Necklace from My Blonde Ambitions

 I have been eying these Elva Fields necklaces for a while now. These are a few of my favorites from the Spring collection.

I love how these beautiful necklaces are one of a kind, and mostly made of vintage materials and I love the look of these with the beads and brooches mixed together. So I set out to make my own version of a necklace with a similar look- only mine is cheap and doesn't pull your hair. (Dear Elva, please take this emulation as a sincere form of flattery!) 

Here's what you'll need:

• Inexpensive faceted glass beads (around 125 or so)
•  A silver toggle set for the clasp as well as two circle parts from a toggle set (I'll explain that later)
• An old brooch (I think mine is from Target a few years ago)
• Wire cutters
• Bead Crimper
• Silver bead crimps
• Ribbon (or in my case satin pulls I cannibalized off a shirt) 
• Beading wire (I used this nylon coated bead stringing wire from the craft store). 

  Here's the bead wire that I'm talking about (it's not really wire, more like fishing wire type stuff).

And these are the crimps. If you don't know what crimps are, they are these tiny silver tubes that you use to crimp the wire onto your toggle, more on that to come.

Directions:

Cut your wire to the length you want (a little bit longer than your row of beads) and put a crimp onto the end. Then stick a circle toggle part onto that.

Thread your wire back through the crimp, and use your crimping tool/ pliers to crimp into place. This will essentially crunch your little tube in half.

A lot of people will use a "crimp cover" which is usually a pretty silver bead designed to cover over your crimp, but I didn't have any, and I'm not that picky, so I just begin stringing my beads on at this point.

Get your beads ready to go, then line them up on your bead board, or if you don't have a bead board use a bath towel so your beads won't roll off of the table. I used about 40 beads for my short row, 44 for my medium, and 48 for the long. But this will vary based on your bead size and how big you want the necklace to be.

Once you get all of your beads strung on then you'll want to add another circular toggle piece to the other side the exact same way we did before. It should look like this.

And then you might think to yourself, "my beads are smiling at me."

Since this necklace is going to have three strands of beads I'm going to repeat the same process until I have three rows, like this.

From here you'll need your ribbon.

Stick one of your ribbon pieces through the circle toggle, and then pull it through.

Then bend the ribbon back onto itself to secure.

I secured mine by sewing back and forth on top of it, but if you don't have a sewing machine (or if it's still in the box and you're afraid of it) you could certainly use a hot glue gun, it should hold just fine.

Repeat this step to both sides of the necklace until it looks like this.

Now here's where it got a little tricky for me because I used these thick satin pulls, but if you use a thin ribbon you should be fine.
You need to thread your other toggle pieces onto each strand of ribbon, so either choose a thin ribbon or a toggle with a wider attachment hole, otherwise you'll be pulling that toggle on with your teeth like me, and your dentist will be mad at you.

Now your necklace should look like this. At this point you need to try the necklace on to see how you want it to fit. Then trim your ribbon accordingly, and sew it or glue it into place at the top of the necklace the same way we did before.

Then you should have a finished necklace with a toggle at the top so that you can undo it to put it around your neck.

At this point your necklace will look something like this. Pretty, right, but wait for it, wait for it...

Ba, da, bing, add some bling.

So much prettier, right? I simply pinned this brooch onto the satin pulls, that way it's removeable, and I can still wear it as a brooch when I want to.

The possibilities with this method are endless. These are very easy (trust me) and can be made within an hour or so (especially if you're not taking pictures at every little step :).

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To see more from Nancy, visit her site My Blonde Ambitions

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