Beaded Suncatcher

I just love working with beads. Love them! 

I saw some beaded wire suncatchers on Pintrest and was inspired. I just had to make some of these for myself. Here is my very first one. I don't think it came to bad. I really like it and it was super fun to make!

I am already nagging the hubster to get me a nice camera. I am so tired of my cell phone camera. What a pity that with as much power as these new phones have these days the camera can be so bad. Maybe it's just user error and I need a better camera that can compensate for my total lack of photography ability. I think I am going to stick with bad cell phone camera. That is my story, and I'm stickin' to it! HA!

So I didn't actually follow any real instructions when I made this. I just looked at some pictures from Pintrest and just gave it a shot. It is really simple to do and I'm sure that most everyone can do the same thing but I'll go ahead and throw down here some basic instructions just in case.

The materials come from the Dollar Tree and Walmart. I love me some cheap DIY! The beads were the most expensive part of this and I have plenty left over to put into other projects so I didn't really mind the $10 it cost me. Okay, that's a bit of a lie, I hate spending $10 on a single thing unless it's going to be an epic project but for this I went ahead and shelled out the money. 

Materials

Beads

Thick wire

Thin jewelry wire

Pliers - jewelry pliers are best but regular pliers will work

Yup, that's all there is to it.

I used the thick wire, in this case the Dollar Tree only had it in black so that is what I used. It came curled up already and I just snipped off a bit of wire and then grabbed both ends and pulled a little to make it elongate into a spiral. Then I just worked the wire a bit to make the curl at the top and bottom a bit smaller and widen it out in the middle. You can work your wire however you want it. Super easy, no measuring and no having to have a form to wrap the wire around. 

Then I chose what beads I wanted. For this I went with a rainbow theme. That took the longest amount of time, separating down the beads into the different colors. The package I bought was one of those all mixed together glass bead packages. There were a lot of beads that are unfortunately unusable because the hole in the middle is clogged. But they came from Walmart so it's not like I was expecting high end beads. I will just find something else I can hot glue them to. Oh, the hubster was thrilled about that. lol

To put the beads on the thick wire I used the thinner jewelry wire and snipped off about a foot and a half of wire. I tried other lengths at first but longer than about a foot and a half and the wire started bending and crimping up on me. It was a mess and I was frustrated. When I wanted to add another length of wire I just wrapped it around a couple of times and kept on movin' and groovin'. The whole point of this is to look hand made. If I wanted factory production quality I would have gone out and bought any number of suncatchers. So I embraced my handmade'ness (if that is not a word I am officially making it one). 

I fiddled with the top for a good long while before I found something that I liked. 

For the bottom I just strung a couple beads on some jewelry wire and hung them. Presto! A suncatcher is born. (cue angels singing)

There really isn't any one set way to do these. With the free form of the wire you can make these however you want. I hope you have fun with this and I would love to see pictures of your beaded suncatchers.