Tuesday, March 12, 2013

A wedding necklace - a keepsake memory

Is it almost wedding season already?!  Apparently!  We've started getting a sprinkling of brides, bridesmaids, and jewelry designers looking for inspiration and supplies to create their own beaded wedding jewelry.  

This afternoon a wonderful woman named Allison came in.  She brought with her quite the ziplock bag of her grandmother's old jewelry.  Some the pieces were costume pieces, very glitzy and sparkly, and others were her grandmother's old pearls, a treasured piece of jewelry in most families.  I know mine are, anyways.  


Allison is getting married in August and is planning to transform her grandmother's necklaces into a beautiful, large necklace and bracelet to wear down the aisle.  She also wanted to add in new beads to tie it all together.  Her bridesmaid's dresses are kind of a blue/teal/turquoise color.  She told me that she's done a little bit of crafting and necklace stringing, however not in a while and nothing too labor intensive.  I love projects like this!  I'm so excited for her.  As we talked, I got to know her a bit more and found out a little more about what she's looking for in a necklace.  


One of the things she mentioned was wanting a large, show stopping piece for the wedding but not knowing what to do with it after the wedding.  Solution: use a spacer bar and lobster clasps with split rings.  Each necklace will basically be an individual necklace that will be "temporarily" attached to the final piece with the spacer bars.  After the wedding, she'll just remove each necklace from the spacer bar and will have several pieces she can wear, one, two, three at a time.

Supplies needed to do this:
  • spacer bars
  • lobster clasps (for attaching individual necklaces to the spacer bars
  • lobster clasp (for the spacers bars to actually put the necklace on for her wedding day)
  • crimp tubes - she went with 2mm x 2mm sterling silver crimps
  • beading wire - a medium weight wire is best for the mixed media project
  • bead board - because she's making several pieces, she'll want to make sure they all measure out correctly
  • and her beads, of course
I'm so excited for her updates on this project.  I { love } the idea of re-purposing her gram's old stuff.  :)  I bet she's going to do an incredible job!  (Allison, if you're reading this, don't forget to come back in and give us updates!)

{ love } + beads,
Anne.

1 comment:

  1. I was in the store at the same time and was delighted to hear about her wedding jewelry plans!

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