DIY bracelet with super thin, but strong elastic for beads with small holes.

Hi!

How is your day?
One of the things I did today was make this bracelet.
It has an elongated natural freshwater pearl as the eye catcher, combined with small tourmaline beads in all kinds of shades of green and teeny tiny hematite beads with their dark grey metallic shine and small goldfilled beads to give it a little sparkle here and there.

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I'm exited about it because I found this very thin, but very strong elastic of 0,4 mm!
I didn't know it existed with the kind of strength that it has. Believe me I have been pulling at it with a lot of strength to test it and it held. 😃

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Now it is possible to string really nice facetted beads and pearls on it which usually have such small holes.
(They have such small holes because drilling the beads with a bigger drill often makes the beads crack. You can get the fancy beads with bigger holes but they are the more expensive kind.)

To make this you need some beads. Things that make it interesting are:

An eye catcher bead, like my elongated pearl, tube beads are also nice for this.
Different sizes and/or colours semi precious gemstones.
To make it really nice, some shiny precious metal beads. For gold coloured beads I recommend using only goldfilled quality as it has three layers of gold on top of messing and lasts almost a lifetime, while it is much more affordable then solid gold.
The teeny ones work well as a detail in between the other beads, as a 'frame' around special beads or when you start with a new kind of beads.

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You will also need a crimp bead cover, to cover up the knot you make. Or if you don't have that, a bead with a large hole that you can slide the knot under.

This is a crimp bead cover:
(It is basically an open metal bead that you can close over a crimp bead or a knot.)

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To close the crimp bead you need a flatnose plier and to cut the elastic some kind of cutter:

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A handy trick 😉 : Before you put the crimp bead cover over the knot, tighten the knot properly and the cut the ends off at about 3 mm from the knot and dab some superglue on the knot. It will melt the knot stuck forever. Now it's safe to put the crimp bead on.

If you feel inspired to let your creativity loose, I wish you a lot of fun with it!

If you want to see what else I make with high quality material, have a look at my webshop: www.claartje.net
(I also send internationally and make custom design.)

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