A Classic Strand of Pearls

I’ve been on the lookout for a pearl necklace for a while because a strand of pearls never goes out of style. A pearl necklace is forever refined and lady-like; it’s a simple accessory that immediately dresses up an outfit. It may be costume jewelry, but it’s elegant costume jewelry.

DIY: Spiral Wire Necklace

Looking at a spiral notebook one morning, I thought the spiral metal rings created interesting shapes that I could create jewelry with.

The Almost DIY: Honeycomb Necklace

I like the hexagonal shape of hex nuts and thought I could form interesting shapes with them to create a pendant. And I did…but it also didn’t quite work the way I wanted it to. [Sigh.]

DIY: Hex Nut Beads

I thought I create jewelry using hex nuts as beads. The easiest way is just to use the hex nuts as is and not paint them, but paint them if you want a pop of color.

DIY: Wire Rope Necklace

While at a hardware store I came across some wire rope that I thought was an interesting material and thought I could create jewelry with it.

I got 10 feet of 1/16 inch size wire rope at 26 cents a foot to experiment with. Regular cutters didn’t work on this wire rope, so I had to get special wire rope cutters (which weren’t particularly cheap), but they cut through the wire rope easily.

DIY: Straw Collar Necklace

I wanted to make a collar necklace using Tape Straw Beads that would be bold and graphic. In order to make all of the rows of beads stay together as one piece I used a strip of plastic canvas as a spacer bar.

The Earring Pendant

Sometimes you just lose an earring; you come home and realize that at some point during the day, you lost it and have no clue of where it could be. You may try to check your home or car or office, but usually, it’s just a lost cause…it’s gone forever. When this happens, I always keep the lone earring I have left in the hopes that I can reuse it in some way.

A lone earring makes for a good charm or pendant for a necklace. My earrings tend to have hooks (rather than studs), so it’s pretty easy to disconnect the dangling part of the earring from the hook. And then I just reattach it to a chain and have a new piece of jewelry to wear.

In this necklace, the long metal rectangle piece used to be part of a set of earrings I had. I made a simple necklace using that earring piece as the main pendant that hangs from a bead, and decided to add a bit more visual interest by using two chains on either side of the pendant. I was glad I could find a way to use this lone earring in a new necklace that I like quite a bit.

DIY: Knotted Embroidery Floss and Jump Ring Necklace

Recently at a store I saw a necklace that added a nice pop of color, and while it wasn’t very expensive, I thought it would be fairly simple to make. So this is my rendition of a Knotted Embroidery Floss and Jump Ring Necklace.

DIY: Button Tower Jewelry

I didn’t need it, but somehow I couldn’t resist buying a jar of buttons at Goodwill. They weren’t fancy buttons, but mostly just the flat two or four holed buttons used in shirts. I divided up the buttons according to their size and number of holes because I thought I’d try using the smaller ones for jewelry.

Pop of Color

I’ve made paper jewelry before in my DIY: Paper Earrings project, but this time I decided to focus on using paint swatches for a pop of color. Paint swatches have just about every color imaginable and in particular the trendier colors of the season. One of the nice things about using paint swatches is that they’re printed on thicker paper so they’re pretty durable, and the coating on them gives them more resistance to water than the average paper stock. Granted, since they are paper they won’t last forever, but I think they’re a simple way to add some color to jewelry—and the colors can be switched out as often as you like.

For this necklace I measured and marked on the back of each paint swatch the size of the pieces I wanted. Then I used my x-acto knife and ruler to cut them out; my pieces were 0.25 inch wide and 2, 2.5 and 3 inches in length. I punched holes at the top of each rectangle and used jump rings to connect them to a chain and finished by adding a clasp.

After I’d made this necklace, I realized that the paint swatch pieces may not always stay flat against me and that the backside of the swatches could show. The backside of a paint swatch isn’t very exciting as it’s just filled with type. If I were to make this again I might glue two paint swatch backs together and (after the glue dried) then cut out my shapes from that so that no paint swatch back would ever show. Plus, it could be interesting to use two different colors that could add some visual interest or make a piece of jewelry reversible.

This necklace wasn’t very difficult to make. However, it is a bit of work to make paper jewelry considering it doesn’t have a long lifespan, but I think it could be worth it if you have a very specific color you want your jewelry to be.

Peter Pan Collar Chainmail Necklace

This necklace came about in a roundabout way as it started out as a bracelet. I’d wanted to try a simple chainmail pattern that used two different sized jump rings and that wouldn’t take too much thought to put together. Yet after I finished the bracelet, I looked at it and was left unexcited; it was just too plain. Unsure of what I wanted to do, I put it away and came back to it months later, deciding to change it into a necklace.

Watch Choker

Once I’d disassembled the watches from my Jar of Junk, my eye was automatically drawn to one of the glass external pieces that protect the watch face (it was only one that was in decent condition). I really liked the simple shape of the piece and thought I could use it to create a piece of jewelry; I decided to make a choker.

DIY: Yarn and Duct Tape Necklace

As I roamed the yarn section of a craft store, I decided I wanted to make a necklace out of a fine yarn. I decided against a flat color in favor of a gray and white yarn; I thought the color shifts in the yarn would work well in jewelry.

The main problem I had in creating jewelry with yarn is what to do with the yarn ends, and my solution was using duct tape to keep the yarn ends from looking ragged. Since duct tape comes in an array of colors, I selected a black duct tape to match my yarn.

Tassel Necklace

I was looking the beading section at a craft store and my eyes fell across a tassel—but to my disappointment it wasn’t a cute one. Tassels are interesting to me because they can go one to too ways: sophisticated or trashy (depending on how they’re used and what they’re made of). There weren’t any other tassel options to buy, so I thought I would just make my own.

With the supplies I already had at home, I chose a bead to be the top of my tassel and attached a pearl beneath it and then added a few lengths of chain below that. I thought about the tassel being on just a single chain, but it was too dull. So I decided to crisscross the chains to create more visual interest. 

Make a Statement

I was shopping at a clothing store and stopped to look at their costume jewelry; I found a necklace that I kind of liked that had various chains strung together. I checked the price, internally scoffed, and thought “I’m not paying that for this. I’ll just make it myself.”