The First Attempt- Pearl Cluster Necklace

Each time I blog about a craft I will link you to the original tutorial or idea. I am in no way taking credit for the ideas of other people, or am I criticizing their tutorial in any way. I may make suggestions along the way of how to avoid my mistakes if you try the craft (think crafting for dummies) but other than that this is basically a journal of the disaster.


Here is a link to the tutorial for the first craft "Pearl Cluster Necklace"


I actually started this craft during my Thanksgiving break, but due to many unfortunate disasters, I did not get a chance to finish it. I braved the Black Friday crowds at JoAnn Fabric to buy all of the supplies for this craft, and I was super excited to start. I arrived home from JoAnn and I had approximately 40 minutes to craft before I needed to get ready to go to dinner with my friends. (Lesson one, only attempt a new craft when you have actual time to work on it). So I sit down prepared to whip out this necklace basically before dinner. HA! Within 5 minutes I exclaimed my deep hatred for beading crafts.


Step one of this tutorial (which I did not take pictures of, view tutorial above) is to put the headpins through the beads and twist them into loops. Well, that did not happen. The headpins I purchased I could bend in half, but I could not make the beautiful little loops that were supposed to be created. I tried this with 10 of my beads, each one more of a disaster then the previous. The next day I had lunch with one of my friends and she suggested we go to a local bead store (The Bead Monkey) to get some advice (good idea Maria). The staff was brilliant and I realized two things, first I didn't have the right type of pliers. For this project you need the round nose pliers and I had purchased the knotting pliers. Also, the saleslady showed me that they had thin, medium and thick headpins. I tried to make a loop with the thin headpin and round nose pliers and magic happened- it worked. I quickly purchased the roundnose pliers and thin headpins for this project For those of you in the Twins Cities be sure to visit The Bead Monkey for all of your bead related projects, their knowledge will help you to avoid many of the disasters I just described.


I went home and successfully made loops with all of my beads while watching a movie. Here is one  pictured below (I apologize for the poor quality picture):

While I was successful in making the loops, my fingers were screaming in pain from being poked by the headpins, and attempting to make these loops.


Next you are supposed to take groups of the beads and put them on a jump ring. I attempted to get these beads onto the jump ring and failed. I had purchased a "double jump ring" and I needed to purchase a single jump ring. I could not even get the double jump ring apart enough to get one bead on. Luckily, I had saved my packaging, packaged those babies right up and returned them (Ok, I confess I had a plane to catch back to Chicago, so my mom returned them and purchased the correct ones- Thanks Mom). I know I am 25, but thank goodness I have that women to help me out! Now you are up to date on where this craft was when I arrived home for Christmas Break (also known as 30 days of bliss).


So I finished this last part in about an hour...mind you it is 6am, and I decided it would be great to finish this craft while laying in bed. In retrospect, kind of a terrible idea as I had to get out of bed about 7 times to go downstairs to get various things to finish this craft, but it was still pretty comfy!


Tip if you are making this necklace- make sure the jump loops are completely closed after you add your cluster of beads otherwise they will start falling off once you start stringing the beads.


Here are all of my clusters- This was an easy part, I started getting a little cocky, in my head I am thinking, okay probably 10 minutes and I will be done. Then the beads started falling off the jump ring and I was brought back to reality.

Successfully strung all of the beads on the wire (I will admit, attempt 5 probably, a couple of false starts due to beads falling off).

Here is the finished product, I wish I would have made the ribbon a little longer, because the necklace is slightly shorter than I would like it.

This necklace if for my mom and later I will post a picture of her wearing it. I am tempted to wake her up and show her my creation, but it is only 7:30 on Saturday morning, so I will not be doing that.


This craft overall wasn't bad, I think I only threatened to quit it about 5 times. If you attempt, I wish you the best of luck!


The next craft project I am going to attempt involves sewing on the sewing machine. Since I don't even know how to thread the needle on the sewing machine, it is going to be interesting. Check back in a few days for the progress on that.


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