How to make a glass bead necklace

A friend of mine is a Swedish tour guide and he often takes visitors to the Ngwenya Glass blowing factory in Swaziland. He brought back some beautiful glass beads for me a few months back.

Hand made glass beads and black netting

I wasn’t sure how to use them and they have been sitting in my DIY stash. Yesterday I wanted to make a necklace with some netting and needed beads with large holes. The glass beads were perfect. I so believe in synchronicity.

You need –

1. A piece of netting. Any colour. You could indulge the neon trend by using neon coloured netting.
The netting needs to be around 1 metre long and about 5 – 10 centimeters wide.

Thread beads on to netting

2. Around 8 to 16 beads with large holes.

To make –

Thread your beads on to the netting. I had to use a wool needle to help the netting through the hole in the beads as they are quite large beads.

You need to space the beads evenly to make the necklace symmetrical. The netting sort of puffs out and holds the beads in place but I made a knot between each bead just in case.

Tie the ends of the netting together and your necklace is complete.

I keep going on about making your own beads. You may have to make you own beads if you can’t find beads with a large enough hole. There are absolutely amazing beads out there made with polymer clay.

Completed necklace

Some of the twisting and rolling techniques may be tricky but plain beads shouldn’t be too much of a challenge. Staedtler make FIMO – and you can also try Sculpey.

I found lovely beads I found on Flickr? Google Saffron Addict They would work well with the tribal trend.

I’m loving anything tribal. Must be becasue I am from Africa. Please let the tribal trend continue into next season.

At the top of this page are the Greenie Galleries. I’m collating the older and newer DIYs so you can see them all at a glance.

More next week.

Greenie.