Earrings, bracelets, necklaces ... I love to make them all. Swarovski crystal beads bring sparkling colors and visual texture to my jewelry designs. Czech Republic glass beads offer rich deep colors, with individual 2-tone Czech beads often possessing unique color shading within the clear glass of the bead. For warm colors, I like to make bracelets from the natural beauty of obsidian and jasper beads.

This necklace is long, for wearing over turtlenecks and has no clasp as it easily slips over my head.

Sometimes I wear the dangle at the bottom of the necklace and other times I wear the necklace with the dangle about midway on one side of the necklace.

To connect the link chain at both ends of the glass beads, I used an eye head pin through each glass bead then making an eye on the head pin's straight end.

Frosted purple glass beads with gold plated chain.

The soft twist and frosted effect provide an interesting look to this purple glass bead.

Photo to the right shows insertion of the necklace for you to see the nice coloring of these purple glass beads.

The link chains for this necklace and the dangle came from gold plated dangles such as the gold plated dangle shown below. These purchased dangles are about 1.5 inches long.

gold dangle

As you can see in the above photo, the top dangle is as purchased.

The lower dangle in the above photo is snipped apart for use as a link chain for a necklace or earrings. The red arrows point to the released parts of the dangle.
I have snipped off the top eyepin of the dangle thereby releasing the bell shaped bead cap (which I set aside for use within other designs).

Green arrows point out some extra snips I took off until I had a nice eyepin left that tightly holds all the dangle's link chains. The lower short red arrow points to this tight eyepin that remains holding all the dangle's link chains.

Small photo to the left: note I attached the dangle of this necklace by putting that tight eyepin of the dangle's link chains into the eyepins of two glass beads.

Silver plated bell shaped capped dangles

This photo to the left shows two silver plated dangles as purchased and then completely snipped apart to provide the individual link chains. For this necklace design I did this with the purchased gold plated dangles to get the individual link chains.

Material list for frosted purple glass bead necklace with gold plated chain:

19 - 1.5 inch long (.028' thickness) gold plated eye head pin

19- 8mm frosted purple glass bead (with a soft twist to the bead)

1 - gold plated earring dangle of link chain with bell shaped bead cap removed.

18 - lengths of chain from gold plated earring dangles. Before beginning to assemble this necklace I stuck a long headpin through these 18 chains, letting the chains hang down from the head pin and I checked to be sure all the chain sections were the same length. I had to snip links off a few of the chains to shorten them to be the same length. Be sure to save the gold plated bell cap of these dangles and used these bell caps as bead caps for other of your designs.

Click to view what tools were used.