One of the reasons I started making my own jewellery is my love of charm bracelets. This is despite the fact that they are an utter pain to wear with the jangling and catching on things. So, it didn't take me long to select this pretty bracelet from November's Make Jewellery Magazine for my monthly make. It's from the Simply Charming project by Juliet Browse.
I was particularly attracted to the cube-shaped resin beads with fabric encased in them. Now, often when I get excited about resin beads I see in magazines, it transpires you have to make them yourself, which is a bit beyond me. In this case, however, I simply had to part with a mere £2.15 for a pack of three from Spoilt Rotten Beads. The millefiori rectangle and murano glass butterfly are from the same store. The pearl beads and the frosted glass bead were just from my stash.
The charm bracelet itself was a ready-made one with a toggle fastening that I found in a box I had helpfully labelled "bracelets". I can't recall its provinence. The beads were threaded onto sterling silver headpins using an assortment of tiny beads to stop them sliding off. I did like the sterling silver bead caps I used on the perarl beads, which came from Palmers Metals.
The beads are attached to the bracelet with wrapped loops. This was a bit awkward as the links of the bracelet are quite thick. Some of my wraps aren't very elegant but I noticed that the ones in the mag weren't super-neat either. The wraps on my pearl beads are pretty good though, probably because they were smaller.
As I didn't use all of the same beads as the magazine, I kind of let the design grow organically. That sounds great but in fact it meant I had to cut off and move several of the beads to get the spacing and balance of the bracelet right. Organic might be better when not using such a permanent method of attachment. However, the wrapped loops do mean that the bracelet is very secure and I shouldn't have bits falling off as you sometimes get when you use use jump rings.
So, all-in-all, I thought this was a cute, inexpensive yet durable piece for my collection pending me making the leap into doing my own resin beads.
Melx
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