15th March- How to make a KeyCharm 2!

It's been a while since I did a post on how to make a keycharm, and I took some photo's whilst I was making one last night.

So - here's a step by step guide as to how you do it!



Whilst this may look like a messy pile of bags and stuff, it's actually quite a well ordered collection of my working needs. Beads in the large red box, and the blue case contains all of my findings.

From all of that, you gather tools and working tray. I use the top of a very large plastic food container - it has a rather useful lip that stops beads rolling out of control. I could get a fancy beading tray, some of which come with a rather wonderful fabric that grips all of the beads and stuff on top of it. Every now and again I say to myself, I must get one of those - and then it slips out of mind. In fact, I rather suspect that I actually like the rather tatty arrangement that I have. It's what I'm used to!






Then, the next step is to gather the beads. This means hunting through the bags to find a selection that you feel will make a good chain. In general I decide what colour I'm going for, and then it's a random selection. This Key Charm is going to be general stock - I sell a lot of these, and at the moment it rather feels like blue is the flavour of the day. People are grabbing blue Key/Bag Charms off me at a rate of knots, Blues and Blacks. I need to build up my stock of black beads, and I have a lot of purple so this particular charm is going to be a blue purple mix. These are the beads I'm going to use.







This is my bag of chain. I've found a nice big secure piece that I intend to use.









And I'm attaching the lobster claw clasp. It's a good secure means of putting the bag/key charm onto either a bag, or to your keyring - I use a particularly good quality jump ring for the link between chain and clasp, because I think it's the weakest link, and the place most likely to break. So - a good heavy duty jump ring minimises this.


You'll have to excuse the plasters - it's been a bad week for oven burns!






This is making the beads ready to attach to the chain. I've selected a blue glass bead, and I've put it on a head pin (this is a pin with a round flat piece of metal at the bottom, as opposed to one with a ring, to which you can attach further beads.) I've also chosen beadcaps (little caps of metal that sit either side of the bead) which in this case, as the bead has a large hole, help it to sit firmly on the pin.
Essentially, at this point you trim off the excess pin, and curl it round to make a loop at the top of the bead.






It's then attached to the chain by the use of a jump ring. You can see me opening the ring here. Jump rings should always be opened by moving one side of split backwards - you should never open one by pulling them apart width wise. If you can imagine looking down on the break, grip either side with pliers, and move one forward and one back gently. That way you don't weaken your ring by disturbing the circularity of it.


And these are the first few beads being attached to the chain.
















And - bead by bead, it grows.




























Clearing up. You can see the finished charm lying on the board next to my bag of purple beads - I always try to return them to the right bag! Occasionally there are a few happy accidents when a bead goes astray into the wrong bag and it makes for new colour combinations I hadn't thought of. Hence the recent experiments I've been making with purple and green.











The finished charm and a pretty well half cleared board. I inevitably end up with a few stray bits and pieces on my board!








And here's the charm, put up for storage on my charm tree (that's actually a kitchen mug tree, but they make brilliant storage for Bag Charms.) It'll go on sale in a while!