Category: Jewellery Making

Jewellery making covers a huge range of possibilities. If you tell someone ‘I make jewellery’, they may assume you are working with gold or silver and using metal-smithing techniques. That is a way of making jewellery, but it’s not something I can help you with here.

What jewellery making techniques can you learn here?

However, you could refine your definition a little. Tell them you have been making jewellery using beads. Then the chances are, they will immediately picture strung necklaces and bracelets or earrings like you could find in high street fashion stores. This is the kind of thing I have in mind in this category.

Now, you may actually be wanting to make jewellery using bead-weaving techniques (like Peyote stitch, netting, etc). So, if this is the case you probably want to be reading about those techniques. You can do that in another part of the beading techniques section.

In this section I’m going to take a look at all those other ways of using beads for making jewellery. These are usually the techniques that people want to learn if they are thinking about creating gifts for friends or contemplating starting a jewellery business to sell their work.

Fortunately the basic techniques for making jewellery are relatively few and are also simple in principle.

Now, although the actual actions you need to learn for the techniques are not complex, you will probably need a lot of practise in order to perfect them. If you are making jewellery for yourself, you can perhaps get away with untidy crimps or uneven wire loops. But if you want to make jewellery for someone else, you really need these techniques to look as good as they would on a shop-bought piece. So what are these techniques?

Stringing and working with findings

Basically, they fall into two areas: stringing and working with findings. I’m going to give you a taste of lots of techniques here. I will link to other resources you can use. Also, to tutorials. This can be the best way to start learning: grab a tutorial and follow the instructions.

Now, I’m still adding to this area. So, if you can’t find what you need at the moment, use this link to ask me what you need to know. I will then focus on creating a post to answer your question(s).