 This design was inspired by the chokers at Shahasp designs which are better made but ever so slightly out of my price range.
It's very easy to make, and the materials only cost around $5, most of which is the chain and beads. Of course if you want silver and pearls the price may increase slightly. All you need to know how to do is opening and closing metal rings with pliers and attaching beads to a chain using head-pins (pins with a flat "head" at the end for the bead to sit on) You do need to own pliers and wire-cutters, but they can be bought from $2 shops if you're really desperate! I'm not 100% happy with the design, but the way I see it is if I put the dimensions up then it's easier to adapt them to something better than start from scratch. |
Materials
All the metal components need to match (Although I suppose you could try contrasting metals if you wanted). I used black nickel. If you're lazy like me, you can buy a pre-made extension chain, but the instructions include the option of making your own.- 80-100cm of chain, links about 3mm wide. I bought 1m and have 27cm left over.
- Three 8mm jumprings (referred to as "big" below)
- Two 5mm jumprings (referred to as "small" below)
- One clasp
- Either an extension chain or one of those little bobs that go at the end of extension chains. (The latter choice is to make your own extension chain matching the rest of the necklace)
- Three head-pins
- Three matching beads around 5-8mm. I made the necklace first, then chose the beads to suit.
- Two sets of pliers, at least one needle or round-nosed. (Or possibly chain-nosed, whatever that means)
- Wire cutters
Instructions
First, make sure you know how to open and close jump rings and make loops on headpins. Though since its so small you can get away with wonky, simple loops if that's too hard.
The basic structure of the necklace is shown below:
You can see a full-size version here.
The black lines are pieces of chain, with their lengths given next to them in centimetres. You need the following lengths of chain:
- Three 4cm pieces
- One 6cm piece if making your own extension chain
- Two 7cm pieces
- Two 8cm pieces
- Two 9.5cm pieces
If making your own extension chain, do so, by adding the bob to the 6cm chain length with one of these extra jump rings.
Now to actually make the necklace. We start with the purple and black bits of the diagram.
Open the big jump rings (if they're not open already) Thread the ends of the chains in order on the rings as in the diagram, then close the rings. For example, onto the leftmost ring we go 8, 4, 9.5, 7. Attaching the chains to closed big jump rings using opened links of chain is harder, but an option if you later realise you made a mistake.
Now to the green and orange bits. Attach the extension chain to the free end of one 8cm chain piece using a 5mm jump ring. Attach the clasp to the other 8cm chain using the last jump 5mm ring.
Now you can decide what beads to add. (Unless you did this already, clever-clogs) Put each bead on a head-pin and make a loop, cutting off the excess with the wire-cutters.
Attach the beads to the 4cm pieces of chain using some of the chain jump rings. You're done!
If it's not quite right it's easy to lengthen/shorten bits of chain/change the beads etc. The original version of this choker had three 7cm-chain-with-9.5cm-loop bits rather than two and it was the work of a moment to change it.