Sunday, January 20, 2013

Beaded Wine Glass Charms



With a few beads, some memory wire and glue, you can make these simple beaded wine glass charms.  I made a lot of these for the wedding and got a lot of complements on them.

What you need:
- Memory Wire
- Seed beads (really small ones for ends)
- other beads for decorations (optional)
- bead glue (I use G S Hypo Cement)
- wire cutters (be warned that the memory wire does damage cutters, so maybe buy some cheap ones that you would use only for this application... at least, that's what I did).

Before you start, you should have a design in mind.  Remember that wine charms should be different from each other so people can use them to know which wine glass is theirs.



Okay so here's what you do:

1.  Cut the memory wire so that you almost complete a circle, minus a quarter inch or so.

2.  Put a small amount of glue to the end of one wire and put a seed bead. Do this to only one end of the wire. The glue should hold the seed bead in place at the end.  Lay the wire and seed bead down to let the glue set (ten or so minutes, I think.  Just check if it appears set.  Full drying time is more like an hour).  In the mean time, you can glue down more seed beads to memory wires.

3.  Once dry, you can put the other beads on as the design you would like.  I like making a big bead the focal point, and the small beads for added color variation.

4.  Time to close it up.  While holding the beads away from the open side of the wire, apply a small amount of glue to the open end of wire and put a seed bead.  Again, put it aside, and let the glue dry (about an hour for full dryness).

5.  Once the glue dries, you have your wine glass charm.  You should now be able to attach it to the stem of a wine glass.

(optional:  you can go back and add a drop of glue at both ends of the wire to give it a little more strength)

1 comment:

Stemless Flute said...

I wonder if there is a much cheaper than G S Hypo Cement. I would also want to have a wine glass with beads design. That would be beautiful!

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