Baubles and Beads: Charm Bracelet with hand made beads tutorial

I bought some lovely little bee charms and decided to make a simple charm bracelet with bumble bee coloured beads.

I mixed a golden colour using citrine, bright orange and clear. I also added some Flex to give extra strength and reduce brittleness.

I also used a jet black but added some clear and flex to give more depth to the bead. When I am using black I use a project pan because cleaning out the melt pot is quite hard with black - even the slightest speck can change the colour of the next pour. So this way I keep the black separate.

any left over I let cool and keep in the pan

The method I use for these hand made beads is often called the Leandra bead - it is created by repeated dipping of a headpin to create a ball. You can actually make lovely contrasting or matching headpins for a project by just dipping once.

You need the mix to be slightly thicker than normal so once the enamel is melted I turn the heat down just a little bit. I also use the lid to tilt the melt pot slightly so that I have a deeper pool to dip into.

I tend to dip all the headpins once and then go back to the beginning by which time they have cooled enough.

this ended up a strange shape because I didn't turn evenly

It is important to keep the pin moving after you've dipped to get a good round shape. A gentle turn works well - too fast and it all flies off the pin, too slow and it makes an odd shaped blob.
It only takes a few seconds for the enamel to become hard enough not to move.

I used the charms as a guide for how big I wanted the beads.

It is quite hard to make them all the same size and of course they don't always end up round but that is part of the uniqueness of the bead.

Once the beads are finished you can heat polish them if they need it - this also can be used to even up any odd shapes but you will need to develop a swirling technique to do this otherwise the enamel will just melt and blob off.