How to Make a Beaded Ring

This wire-wrapped beaded ring is so easy anyone can do it, and I do mean anyone. I made three of them, as you can see from the picture above, and I'm not even that artistically talented.

All you need to make your own beaded ring is some small beads (3-4mm work really well), some wire, and a few useful tools. Check out my other hub on how to make your own beaded jewelry for more information about all the supplies you will need to make jewelry yourself.

So how do you make a ring? There are lots of different techniques, but here's how I made mine.

As you can see, I used a really imprecise method of measuring the wire for this project. I wrapped it around my finger! It worked well enough, I guess, but I think I need to invest in a ruler or some sort of ring sizer for making rings in the future. That would make things a whole lot easier!

When you know how much wire you're going to need, you can cut it using your wire-cutting pliers - or scissors, if your wire is thin enough and you don't have the cutting pliers.

Try to make as clean a cut as you can. Even with the pliers, you might not be able to cut through on the first try if your wire is too thick. I wouldn't recommend using a really thick wire for this project, anyway, because it won't be as easy to work with. I used a 28 gauge wire, although that might've been a little too thin. 20-22 gauge is probably best.

Put one end of your cut wire length in your needle-nose pliers as shown in the top photo. Loop the wire down around itself two or three times. When you do this, you should have something that looks like the wire in the bottom photo.

There is no special trick to this really, just make a natural turning movement - whatever feels right to you. That's part of the beauty of making your own jewelry: no one does the same thing in exactly the same way. That's why, even if you are making the same ring I am, your ring will look slightly different than mine because we're two unique individuals.

And, as you can see from the picture at the introduction of this hub, my three rings all look different, even though I used the same technique on each of them. The materials are slightly different, but that's the only real mechanical difference.

The loop on the end is for making sure that your beads won't fall off the wire when you're stringing them. When your satisfied with your loops, use some flat-nose pliers to flatten and tighten them. Once you know it is securely in place, then you can start stringing the beads.

It's a lot easier if you decide your design before you start stringing. The sky is the limit here, practically. Do you want your ring to be all the same color? Do you want every bead in your ring to be a different color? It's up to you.

For this ring, I used two different types of beads - the blue cat's-eye glass and the slightly smaller plain black glass. Why did I pick this color combination? Well, basically, those are the beads I had on hand. I took an old necklace that I was getting tired of (it had these really huge, ugly black tube beads) and just cut it up and decided to use the nicer beads for this little ring. I'm still not sure what I'm going to do with those tube beads.

Make sure you leave a little bit of wire hanging off the end so that you can easily connect it to the other wire end.

Carefully curve the wire around so that both ends meet. Make sure you hold on well to your beads. I've messed this up a few times and have had beads fly all over the place. This is especially not fun, considering you have to redo all that hard work. Talk about a wasted effort!

Take the straight end of your wire and stick it through your looped end (you can probably use your hands for this). Then take your needle-nose pliers and curve the straight end around the looped end. I usually circle the wire around itself three or four times, to make sure the connection is good.

Once you have the wire looped around itself so that you feel confident the connection will hold, you need to take your flat-nose pliers and flatten the wire.

If there are any sharp ends sticking out, you can take your wire cutters and carefully snip them off (you don't want to catch any of the beaded wire in with them). Then press those ends firmly down with your flat-nose pliers.

These two photos show, obviously, what the finished ring looks like both off and on a finger.

When I finished this ring, I realized just how much I really needed a more accurate form of wire measurement because the ring was much bigger than I had originally thought. I sized the wire (I thought) to fit my ring finger (size 6). It turns out, the ring fits my index finger (size 8).

So, lesson learned. From now on, I'm at least going to use a ruler to make sure I won't have any more mis-sized surprises!

That's another great thing about making your own jewelry. It's easy enough to fix it yourself.

I hope you've enjoyed reading this hub and learned a little something about making your own jewelry.

I love these beaded rings. They're really fun to make, and they feel fabulous on your finger. Try it for yourself and let me know what you think!