COMPLETING THE RIBBON BEAD DANGLES PROJECT
I have now finished embellishing all the sparkly ribbon beads which I made.
After my last post, I found that I had not completed the longer beads. Here is the remainder of them, duly embellished.
The round beads
I then began to embellish the smaller round beads, which I’d made from the sparkly ribbon I bought in the charity shop. I really liked the long bead at the far right in the above photo, with its pink tassel. This was the only tassel in my danglies box so I decided to make some more. I made them from some silky embroidery thread which was rather slippery and difficult to deal with. I wound it around a piece of cardboard and made the tassels ready to attach to the beads.
Tasselled beads
The black and silver beads
I really like these, and I think they may be my favourite of the collection. The ones at the top have a crystal gem attached – these were taken off one of the charity shop necklaces. I had to add jump rings to them.
The blue beads
I really like these too. I spent a long time last night, working on the dangly embellishments on these. This necklace was one of the charity shop ones:
which, when I saw it, I thought would provide a nice lot of embelishments. However, when I examined it, I could see that each element had three loops on it and these would not hang well from the bottom of a bead. I thought about it for a while, and then thought that if I took the whole thing apart, jump ring by jump ring, I could rearrange the elements in pairs and make a dangly that would work. This is the result.
The red and gold beads
I really like these, too, especially because of the richness of the colour – the photo really doesn’t do them justice, because in real life they are incredibly sparkly. Also, I like the variety of danglies on them, many of which were taken from a charm bracelet in my junk jewellery box.
All the new beads
Detail shots of some of the new beads
The complete set of all the beads made from sparkly ribbon
I have made a total of fifty-seven beads! I have thoroughly enjoyed this project. The process is very varied and can be done as a production line. I had tremendous fun removing danglies from various junk necklaces and sorting out what I wanted to use, and I am very thrilled with the way the actual bead construction worked, with the drinking straws, the ribbons and the bead caps. The spacer beads and additional beads really complete each one, and they could stand alone at this stage without the addition of danglies. This is what I wanted to do in order to make a good selection of embellishments for future projects, and I can always remove the danglies if I need to for any given project. There’s a huge variety to choose from.
I would like to try making some larger beads from more normal ribbon, now I’ve sorted my ribbon stash. It would be a good way of using up those scraps. I also have quite a few larger danglies which were not suitable for the current project.
Now I have to decide how to store them. I have seen a couple of very good YouTube videos and I think I can adapt those ideas. I think an album style of storage would be best, along the lines of the album I am currently making to store my fussy cuts – something adaptable and expandable, but not taking up too much shelf room. This would be better than just storing them loose in a box, because I’d be able to see at a glance what I’d got.
