How To Make A Beautiful Scrap Necklace

When you spend some time crafting, as I do, you wind up with a lot of “scrap” material. If you’re familiar with crocheting, you might have stumbled across the term “Scrapghan,” which is an afghan blanket made of yarn scraps. Today, I’m going to show you how you can make a scrap necklace! This project is like a scrapghan, only for necklaces.

The beauty of a scrap necklace is it can either be symmetrical (as mine below is), or you can go completely asymmetrical and string together a necklace that doesn’t play by any “matching” rules. I decided to go with a predominately pink and green theme because those are fantastic colors (remember Sailor Jupiter from Sailor Moon? Freaking amazing!). I did accent these colors with black beads, though.

This necklace is a simple single strand tutorial, but if you want to jazz it up, I suggest adding extra strands in for a bit more depth and texture. I chose instead to have a few different styles of beads do all the talking for my single-stranded necklace.

What You Will Need:

• An assortment of beads (I had a variety of different sizes and shapes)
• Jewelry wire (0.6mm of any type of jewelry wire is good)
• Split rings (to attach the closure on)
• Crimp tubes
• A closure (I chose a lobster clasp, but any will do)
• Round nose pliers
• Wire snipping tool
• Crimping tool (Read more about pliers here)

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Crimping Your Jewelry Wire

I started by crimping off one side of my jewelry wire. I begin by placing a crimp tube on the string near one end, leaving about an inch or so of a “tail.”

Then you take that “tail” back through the tube (creating a loop that you can then connect to other things) and crimp it closed, leaving a loop that will be large enough to connect with your split rings. 

With a crimp tool, you’ll notice that there are two shapes it forms when closed. Start by lining up the tube with the crescent moon shaped portion and squeezing the tool shut. This will pull the tube over the wire once.

Next, move the tube up to the circular shape closer to the ends of the tool and close the tool over the tube once more. Your wire is now crimped shut on one side. You can either snip off the excess “tail” or thread it into the beads.

For a helpful video tutorial on how this works, check out Beadholique on Youtube.

Start Stringing Those Beads

Now you can string your beads along your wire without them sliding off the other end! Since we’re working on a scrap necklace, the pattern isn’t set in stone. I chose to work in symmetrical sections, so I did 20 tiny black beads, followed by a larger black and gold bead and then 10 green beads and so on.

You can either follow this pattern or string whatever you think looks interesting in whatever order you like.

When you’re finished with that strand, you just repeat the crimp process on the other side to secure your beads.

Attaching The Closure

Once you have your string (or multiple strings as the case may be), I would use a split ring on each side to connect your jewelry wire loops to your closure. I choose fairly big ones because I find them easier to hook into the lobster clasp, but it’s all up to you.

Then you just connect your lobster clasp to one of your split rings and your necklace is complete!!

Final Thoughts On The Scrap Necklace

I love the fact that a scrap necklace can help clear out a bunch of old beads that you bought for other projects. It’s my new favorite upcycling project, and if you do a lot of beading as I do, you have tons of beads that are just sitting in your supply doing nothing. Scrap projects can help clear those lonely beads out.

Don’t be afraid to experiment a little bit with different textures and beads for this style of project. Pretty much anything goes, it comes down to what you like and what you think looks good. I chose to stick to a color theme, but it can be fun to experiment with a variety of color combinations and see what you create!

So that is all for this week my friends, I’d love to hear how your scrap project turned out, let me know in the comments down below, and I’d love it if you could share this post to your favorite social media platform and pin it to Pinterest.

Next week, I’m going to be dabbling with some casting resin again, and I’m going to share with you some new ideas to try out if you’re interested. Until then, stay crafty my friends!