Best Tips to Make Your Own Jewelry

By: Aysha Schurman

Learning to make your own jewelry can result in beautiful decorations, not to mention a lucrative personal business. Whatever your reasons for creating the ornaments, make things easier by heeding the lessons learned by countless generations of crafters.

Keep It Balanced
Regardless of the style or type of jewelry you intend to create, it should be visually pleasing. It doesn't matter if you're into pink flowers or dead vampires, there are certain combinations that create a pleasing visual effect and ones that to create unpleasing visual effect.

Balancing any piece of art is all about proportions. Jewelry should always pay attention to proportions and the overall shape of the piece. Do the charms for your necklace fit together awkwardly, or do they create a flowing line? Do the beads for your bracelet have matching hues, or is each one a different color?

If you're looking at a piece of jewelry that is considered generally attractive, it probably creates a smooth line and has matching color patterns, even if it's presented in a very abstract manner. You can still have six different styles used in a single piece of jewelry, just a long as you also have one, main theme to tie everything together.

Simplify Your Design
The one mistake almost all beginning jewelry crafters seem to make is over-designing their jewelry. When you add too much to a piece, it appears cluttered and haphazard. It's the underlying theme and flowing lines that create your statement, not the amount of beads you include.

Cut out the clutter and use just a few main focal points to design your own jewelry. You can be loud, trendy or even offensive with your creation, as long as you avoid giving a headache to anyone who wears or looks at the object.

Think About Use
For truly great jewelry that gets used, you need to consider comfort and fit for each piece you create. A heavy pair of earrings with nine, bead-covered hoops may be funky, but they'll also be uncomfortable to wear and easy to tangle hair in. Combine comfort and design for fantastic adornments that become heirloom treasures.

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