Ring Tutorial: Making a ring with a flower bead

Hi all, thought it was time for another jewelry tutorial! In my very first blog post, I showed everyone how to make rings out of everyday-buttons. At the end of that post, I also mentioned that I will demonstrate that same technique with beads that are made for jewelry-making purposes. So this is it; making a ring with a button bead. Many beads are drilled off-centered such as this bead I used below, they are mainly made this way for a dangling effect on earrings or bracelets. But with my method of wrapping these into individual rings, you will be able to get a lot more worth for each bead that you pay for.
Again, the technique used in this tutorial is practically identical to my first post; "Make Rings out of Buttons!" Same materials are used as well for this tutorial, so to save time, I'm not going to repeat the material list. Steps are as follow:

Wrap the wire through the flower stem onto the mandrel and wrap few times around the mandrel. Play with the length of the wire starting at 2 feet, that should be plenty to wrap 8-10 times around the mandrel. When desired width of the ring shank is reached, wrap the remaining wires around the stem(bottom) of the bead.

Take the ring off the mandrel, wrap wire on each side of the shank once then pull with pliers to ensure both sides are equally tight. Continue to wrap around the shank, snip off the ends on top of the shank so your fingers will not be against the sharp ends of the wire. 

Put the completed ring back onto the mandrel to shape the roundness of the shank. And viola! You've got a wearable ring!

Hope you will try this tutorial, it really is as easy as it looks! If you are in the business of making and selling jewelry, when analyzing cost versus sale-price, you'd know that rings are sold at the highest margin compared to any other piece of jewelry. Since beads like these are typically sold by a batch, using these individually to make rings will yield much higher profits than using them as earring or bracelets. Of course this is just me speaking from my point of view based on my experiences; there are plenty designers out there that can up-sell anything lol. So this is it for this week. Hope you all like it! Comment if you have any questions or suggestions :)

Make Rings out of Buttons!

(Making use of those extra free buttons that comes with most shirt purchases)

Haven't you always collected those extra buttons that came with every shirt you bought thinking that one day you'll need it? The truth is, most shirts will go out of style before it looses a button lol. If you are like me, you have about at least a dozen of these babies on the bottom of a drawer near the vanity. Finally, I decided to do something with them. Why not making them into rings!!! So I got some cheap wire from HobbyLobby and went to work.

The wire I'm using is base-metal bead wire, 24 gauge; they are cheap enough for you to practice with and strong enough to last when worn. I got them 1/2 off during HobbyLobby's (every-other-week) promotion so they were only $1.25 or so. Because it is just mixed base metals, please be careful if you are allergic to any type of metals. My size-6 ring took about 30 inches of wire, so to be broad, I'm gonna say 1 yard (36 inches) is plenty for a ring of any size. Since this rollI is 24 yards, you can definitely make 24 rings for $1.25 of wire. That's about 5 cents per ring. Not too bad, right?

Before starting, due to some pulling of the wires, make sure you start the ring one size larger on the mandrel. So here's how you can make the ring:

  Put the wire through the hole of the button, wrap as many times as desire, then prepare to wrap around the actual button, one wire from the top of the button, the other from the bottom. After wrapping 3-4 times, take the ring off the mandrel and start wrapping around the band. You have to pull pretty hard to tighten the band, I just pulled the wire with the tip of my pliers. Snip off the excess, and you got yourself a ring for less than $.05, and definitely a conversation starter too!

Same technique works on two-holed buttons as well, see below

Different views of the rings:

Using the same method, you can use vintage buttons with sterling wire to make something more upscale. There are even gemstone beads made in shapes of buttons, so there are quite a few options out there. If I make a ring with a gemstone button later on, I will make another blog post showing it off. I hope you all enjoyed my first post, I'll be posting at least once a week, so I hope you'll subscribe!