This month's offering from Make Jewellery Magazine is unusual in that it is pretty much exactly as shown in the mag. Normally, I end up adapting the projects to better suit my taste or to use beads and findings I already have in my stash.
This month, though, I was quite taken with the green chain maille jewellery in the Get Set! project, which turned out to be available as a kit from Beads Unlimited. As it was only £8.99, I sent for it straightaway (also taking advantage of the Magazine's offer of free pliers, bag of glass beads and instruction booklet from the same supplier). I've orded from Beads Unlimited a number of times before and always found them to be very good in terms of quality and speed of delivery.
A day or two later, the kit arrived. You got plenty of beads and jump rings and an inexplicably huge amount of headpins. The instructions were very clear and easy to follow and the process was quite simple in terms of threading the beads to the headpins and then joining them with groups of jump rings. The only potentially fiddly part is the bracelet, to which I had to add an extra group of jump rings to get the length correct.
Each bag of beads is unique/random, so to that extent my necklace and bracelet are not identical to the mag, but I thought the selection I received was just as nice. The only thing I would do differently is to have picked out the bracelet beads first - it was more important to have a balanced set of beads in terms of size and shape for the bracelet than the necklace. I actually raided my free bag of mixed glass beads to get the bracelet right, which handily included some green ones. I would have been fine if I'd have done the bracelet first.
Still, I thought this was a great value kit that was quick and easy to make and looks fabulous on as a set or as separate pieces.
Melx
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