What you’ll need:

  • 0.8mm wire – 30cm
  • Feature bead
  • Ring Mandrel or cylindrical object
  • Pliers: Side cutters and chain nose

Notes: This wonderful tutorial was submitted by Nicollette Thornton. It’s a quick and easy design that creates a stunning result.

1. Cut approximately 30cm of your 20 gauge wire.
2. Thread your feature bead onto the centre of the wire.See photo.

3. Place the bead onto the mandrel and bend the two ends in the same direction (downwards or upwards) at a 90 degree angle to the way you want the bead to sit. If you don’t have a ring mandrel you can use any suitably sized cylindrical object such as a texta pen, lipstick or mascara. Here I have used lipstick as a mandrel. see pictures.

4. Wrap the ends around the mandrel and back towards the bead so that a ring is formed. see picture.

5. Continue to wrap the wire around the mandrel and cross the two ends over the underneath of the bead with one tail passing on either side of the bead.

6. Finish off the structure of the ring off by wrapping each tail around the ring base on either side of the bead. To make these tight wraps you may need to use your pliers, pulling on the wire as you wrap it to tighten it.See photo

7. Continue until you have made 5-6 wraps. See photo

8. Cut off any excess wire and tuck in the ends using your pliers.
9.The finished result!

10. Thanks Nicollette for a great tutorial! And here’s one I made using the same technique, however I wrapped the wire around the beads an extra time to give them a frame:

11. And while you’re here, why not check out what’s new this week at My Beads!