here's another keepsakecrafts.net video for house of gems today we're using heavy gauge wire and making hammered bangle bracelets that are great for stacking so to make our bracelets you will need some heavy gauge wire this is 12 gauge you could also use 14 it would be a little finer 10 would be heavier use what you have on hand and i have about a 10 and a half inch piece here you'll also need some fine gauge wire and i have here about a yard of 28 gauge you could use something a little heavier 26 even 24 would work and it would give you a different look and then for decoration you could use cup chain you only need about three inches or you could just use some beads and here i have three inches of beads already strung on my wire for tools you'll need a chasing hammer and a bench block or an anvil to pound it on and one of these is really helpful although not absolutely necessary it's one of these leather sandbags i'll tell you more about that you'll also need some round nose pliers and wire cutters and if you have a bracelet mandrel that's great i don't but i do have this clay one that i made that serves the same purpose or you can just find yourself a jar or a bottle that is about the width that you would like your bangles to be made so the first thing you'll want to do after cutting your heavy gauge wire is to take some time and use a file to file these ends flat and if you want you can round them slightly since the wire is so heavy just to make it smooth and rounded the next thing you need to do is some hammering of your wire now you can hammer directly on this sandbag but another great use is that you can put your anvil or bench block on it it will help hold it steady and also dampen some of the sound so we're just going to go ahead and use our hammer and hammer all along the length of this one side of this wire we're going to basically make it so that it has two flattish sides you do want to be sure that you start out with wire that's fairly soft if it's already hard when you start it it's going to be very difficult to shape and form and especially the more you pound it the harder it will get so go ahead and just hammer all along one side now you can see i've gone ahead and pounded one side of my wire flat and you can see it's curved towards that side and that's just perfectly normal because you're stretching out the wire but now what we're going to do is just kind of straighten it out and this will actually end up being the outside of our bracelet just straighten it out a little bit so that you can pound the other side and as you're pounding go ahead and allow it to curve make sure you keep the side that you just hammered down you can kind of use your non-dominant hand just to allow that to curve up so now what you should have is a flattened piece of wire with two sides once both sides are hammered flat you can shape your bangle by putting it on your form like i said either a ring mandrel the nice thing about a ring mandolin is you can hammer right on it just a round form we'll do a bottle or something about three inches in diameter and take a little time to make yourself a nice round shape now these end wires are going to be curled back so you can actually have them overlap each other just a little bit and then once you're satisfied with your round shape you can place this on your sandbag and hammer it some more and that will further work harden the metal so that it will hold the shape and it's kind of nice the way the leather just grips the metal and really holds it in place for you don't worry about making an absolute perfect round shape these are supposed to have a rustic look so it's at this point you can take your round nose pliers and i use the widest part of my pliers and i'm just going to grab that wire and make a big old loop with it just like that and this isn't hard to do you just have to make sure and grip it tightly it's the same way you make any loop you just need to put a little bit more muscle into it and then again you can put it on your sandbag and hammer those so they're both on the same plane and there's your bracelet now later on if you want to you can wire these together to make it a true bangle or you can leave them separate so that it's a little bit adjustable more like a cuff bracelet and now we can add our decoration what i have here is three inches of beads and i've strung them onto some wire i'm just going to center them on this other end of the bracelet and then wrap the wire for about a quarter three-eighths of an inch nice tight coils you want to pull on the wire as you do this so that it's wrapped tightly because this is what's holding your beads in place if you find that your wire is making loops and kinking just undo the loop don't pull on it and you'll end up with a weak spot that will break very easily just straighten out that loop so now i'm just going to do a wrap or two back to my bead hold that first bead in place on top of your bracelet and wrap this wire around the wire that's holding the bead and it depends on the gauge of the wire you have how many wraps that you do with this very fine gauge i'm going to do about three slide another bead down kind of press down that wire and then go ahead and do the same amount of wraps keep going all the way to the end of your beads so here you can see i've wrapped on all of my beads i have just a little bit of that wrapping wire left and i'm just going to wrap that until it runs out and then use this wire that was at the other end just to wrap back towards the bead just to make it nice and neat and finished and even looking and then when you're done you just trim off that wire and you can use pliers to kind of tuck that in so it's not going to catch anywhere this is a cuff bracelet and if you want to make it into a bangle all you need to do is wire these two loops together like i did with these it was just about six inches of wire and i went around this way and then around the other way tucked in the ends i used a pair of flat nose pliers to squash that all flat this time i used cut chain instead of a string of beads and i wrapped it just the same way about a quarter of an inch beginning and then three wraps between each rhinestone and a quarter of an inch at the end but either way you can stack these together it would be great to add a few more maybe some pearls and some clear crystals and have some great stacking bangles