Daily Wire Tip June 13: Attaching Beads to Tablecloths
Daily Wire Jewelry Making Tip
June 13, 2010
Question:
I bought from Wire-Sculpture 1 kilo bag of diverse beads. Got these because I needed heavy beads to make some table cloth weights to attach so winds won’t blow it away. To my surprise, holes on these beads are very large. My question is: how do I attach these to small rings? Are there head pins to use in this case? I am just starting to bead and wondered if you can help me… or if you have any suggestions. Thanks for your time. You have a wonderful website full of goodies!
Answer:
Your crafting project sounds very interesting. I am thinking that you are asking how to hang these large holed beads from rings that are already attached to the tablecloth, or that you will be sewing on? If so, then my advice would be to sew the rings to the tablecloth first, as the weight of the added beads will make that part cumbersome, if done after attaching them to the rings. To attach the beads, I suggest using a heavy-gauged round wire, maybe even a base metal such as brass, or even copper, in a 14-gauge round. You can find a millimeter-to-gauge size chart here to find what gauge will fit your beads’ holes.
For the bead dangles, I would use the length of the bead plus 3 or 4 inches of your chosen wire (depending on how big you want a spiral at the bottom on the bead to hold it on the wire). After cutting the wire length, follow the video tutorial found here, to make a spiral (use about 1″ of wire for the spiral) at one end of the wire. Then thread on the bead and follow this video to make a wrapped loop at the top of the wire, after inserting the first loop into the ring attached to the tablecloth.
Hope it comes out pretty!
Answer contributed by Dale “Cougar” Armstrong
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beads, jewelry making ideas, jewelry supplies, large hole beads, problem-solving, show displays, wire gauge
Filed under:Daily Wire Jewelry Tips‚ Gemstones & Beads‚ Project Help‚ Sales, Marketing, Shows, & Display‚ Wire & Wire Wrapping
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Sorry folks, the conversion link didn’t go up. Here it is: http://www.wire-sculpture.com/pages/wire_footage_charts.html just scroll down to the bottom chart.
I have just read about the table cloth and I have a few ideas (as I use to crochet and quilt a lot). Heavy crochet thread would work great for that, and is the table cloth fabric or plactic? Either way she needs to put a double piece of fabric or something of her choice under where she sews, that goes for using wire also. I hope this gets to her and helps, I love this site also.
Thank you Dale for your information and the shared links you have here. You take care of us sooo well and I just wanted to take this opportunity to express my personal thanks for all your instruction and time spent helping us “poor newbies” of which I am definately one!! Question: Is there a way that we can easily SAVE the links you share for future use. Right now I am copying and pasting them to a .txt file I keep. I just make a little note as to the video content and then I copy and paste the link in a list I keep there. It is not hard to do but I was wondering if you have a list of links on different subjects that I could copy and email to myself?
Hi Karen,
That is probably the easiest way to keep track of links. We constantly have so much information, that it would be hard for us to compile a comprehensive list of all our information. Another way to keep track of your information is to use a bookmarking program on your browser. Just bookmark the page and put it into a folder. That way, when you’re ready to view the page again, you just have to open up your bookmarks. This is personally what I do to store links of pages I want to refer to later on.
Hope that helps.
I saw two pretty versions of this at an art festival I was vending at. One jewelry artist took one of the medium sized black “clips” you get at office supply stores (about 1″ long) and to one of the ‘wings’ she attached a wire ‘dangle’ of about 15 beads. She used one bead crosswise for the bottom bead, with the wire running horizontally thru it, then brought together like a reverse keyhole, and stacked all the beads up that double length of wire. That was attached to one of the ‘wings’ of the clip. Then she could just clip it on anywhere on the corner of the table cloth. The other artist used one of the “ID card lanyard clips”, just the metal clip, and attached her ‘dangle’ of beads to the hole in this clip. Again, she could clip it anywhere she needed it on the corner of her tablecloth. I loved these ideas!