African Wire Beads Ideas for Key Rings & Necklaces
- African bead crafts make beautiful, personal gifts.beads image by Florence from Fotolia.com
African wire-and-bead crafts make lovely gifts. The beads make it possible to add any colors you want to your creation, and the wire gives you the freedom to create a wide variety of shapes, from animals to simple necklaces to flowers to bracelets. Keychains and necklaces are good starter projects for anyone interested in African wire beading. - Use wire and African beads to make a colorful, funky necklace. You'll need a 3-yard piece of beading wire and several colorful beads---the number and color of the beads is up to you. Slip the wire through a jump ring and twist it, securing the jump ring one yard into the wire. Begin sliding beads onto the shorter piece of wire, twisting the wire around each to hold it in place. Using the longer piece, weave and twist it back through your already-threaded beads, adding more beads in between. Loop the wire around to bring it back to where it stared. Secure the loose ends to another jump ring, and use memory wire and a clasp to complete the necklace.
- Use wire and beads to create small animal shapes, such as frogs or lizards. Using wire allows you to bend and shape your creation even after it's complete, so you can pose the animal, making this keychain truly distinctive and fun.
To make your own wire-and-bead animal, start small. Begin by laying the beads out on a piece of graph paper in the pattern of your animal. (You can draw colored circles on the graph paper first, so if your beads become disturbed you can replace them without getting lost.) Start at one end and thread the wire through the first bead or line of beads so that an even amount of wire protrudes from both ends. For the next line of beads, thread the wire from the right side of the first line through from right to left and the wire from the left side of the first line through from left to right. Repeat this pattern through each line of beads. At the end of the last line, twist the wire into a loop suitable for attaching to a keychain. - You can use a similar technique to make wire-and-bead flowers that you can use to decorate key chains or as pendants for necklaces. Lay out your beads in the shape of a five-petal flower. Use the beads to create the outlines of the petals rather than filling the petals in. Begin with a single petal. Slide all the beads for the petal onto the center of the wire and twist them into a petal-shaped loop. Do the same for the next petal, but twist them into a loop right at the base of the first petal. Repeat for all five petals, so that they form a flower shape. Then thread the two ends of wire through a larger bead and pull and twist the wire down through the petals, so the big bead makes a center for your flower. Leave enough wire to make a loop for attaching the flower to a necklace or keychain.
