here's another keepsakecrafts.net video for house of gems today i'll be showing you how to take a great big focal bead and turn it into the centerpiece of a necklace so here's a rather large focal bead that I picked up at a bead show a while back this was made by glass artist and Conlan and it's nearly an inch and a half wide at its widest it's a lentil shape it's two-sided and of course it's meant to be the focal piece probably in a necklace it's a little large for a bracelet or earrings but there's lots of different approaches that we can take when using a bead this big to make a piece of jewelry you could go with the bigness and make several other components at a large that go all around it and accent it you could just string it onto some simple chord and call it done but for today i decided that i was going to string it just on multiple strands of smaller beads that would accent this and the first thing i did when i was looking at the colors course the first thought was blues because the bead is blue but then i took a look at the murine e these little decorations that she added to the bead and i decided to focus on those from my colors and so the first thing i picked out was a green that goes really nice with the blue and also kind of brings out the colors in the decoration and then I pulled out a yellow this actually took longer to pull out the beads then it will probably take to put it all together so we'll have multiple strand well two strands of each of those and then it has a bit of a gold in it and so I have these brass beads that I thought would add a little different texture and finish and then there's also the black this dark now I tried black beads but they really were too stark and then I found these interesting star shaped beads and I kind of like the way there's strong with the is grey clear glass beads in between and so I think I'll just do one strand of that to kind of bring out the dark and I think that looks pretty good and you notice I'm making visual decisions visually I've got an idea in my head but before I decide you always want to just put your beads next to your focal bead and be sure that they work so this is actually going to be a very simple project what you'll need to finish off the ends are a couple bead caps and 2i pins a jump ring and a lobster clasp in some crimps and of course you'll need bead stringing wire to string your beads on and then for tools whatever you like to use for crimpers a crimping pliers chain nose pliers just to flatten you crimps as I've shown you before I'm going to use the one step crimper and then other tools you'll need just wire cutters round nose pliers and chain nose pliers you'll also find some of these bead Stoppers very helpful in keeping your beads from falling off the strands in addition some chain to finish around the back of the necklace and if you have beads like I don't want to use all of my brass beads here so I'm going to alternate them with some of these clear seed beads just to stretch them out of it so the first thing you'll want to do is decide how long you want your strands on either side of your bead to be and I've decided I'm going to have about seven and a half eight inches of beads on either side so then you want to double that and add some so 16 plus the width of my bead so I'm going to cut about a 20 inch piece of wire I've got my wire cut and I put a bead stopper on one end now the great thing about having these beads on the strands is that you can just string them like this look at that I've got it all on there and I can just run my wire right through is a lot faster than stringing them one at a time so just go ahead and string on half of your beads so I'm going to have seven strands on each side so I'm going to cut my seven strands of wire and string half of my beads on each one so now I've got all seven of my strands strung with half my beads I put seven and a half inches on each strand and I finished up all the ends but one with a crimp and I'll show you how to do that on this one so to finish the end with a crimp we don't have to make these pretty or fancy because they're going to be hidden inside bead caps just slide your wire through a crimp and then back through the other end leaving a small loop like an eighth of an inch just very small and the most important things about using crimps however you do it chain nose pliers crimping pliers or with a tool like this one step crimper make sure your wires are parallel inside that crimp and not crossed over each other and then after you make your connection before you move on just always test it make sure it's strong and it's not going to slide so your necklace isn't going to fall apart trim off the excess wire so here's my seven strands and I'm just going to put them all together on an eye pin so just open your eye pin by twisting it to the side just like you would open a jump ring and then slide on all seven loops love your bead strands when you have that done go ahead and close up that loop so once you have all of your loops on your eye pin and you can just slide on a bead cap and make a wrapped loop and you do that by grabbing the wire right where it comes out of the cap with chain nose pliers bend it at a 90 degree angle tuck in some round nose pliers right into that bend wrap it around the Flyers reposition so you can finish the loop and if you're going to add chain here just put on the end one of your links of chain before you finish wrapping loop close up that loop and hold it with chain nose pliers and then use another pair of chain nose pliers to wrap that wire around that little stem there and as you can see today it's coming up messy wraps that's okay trim off your excess wire and make sure that little end is checked in and isn't going to Pope anybody and that's how you finish up all those wire ends so we're going to slide them all down into the bead cap as much as they will go yeah they're all our wires together and now I'm just going to take off all these bead Stoppers and all of these wires are going to go through I think focal bead there you have half of the necklace done now all you need to do is string the beads on the other side finish the ends the same way with crimps and a bead cap and a piece of chain add your clasp and a jump ring and your necklace is done