All About Crimp Beads And How To Use Them

Hi there. In today's video, I'm going to tell you all about crimps, those tiny little bits of metal that hold your jewelry together.

So these are crimps. These are little tiny tubes of metal that hold much of our jewelry together. They come in two different forms. Right here you see them in a bead form. It's just a little bit more rounded on the edges. And also crimp tubes which are a little bit longer. It can be even longer still. And these really do hold our pieces of strong jewelry together. And they're quite simple to use, but it's important that you use them right, so that your jewelry holds together securely.

As you can see here, crimps come in any finish you like. Gold, gold-plated. You can find them in sterling silver. Those are nice quality. These are antique gold-colored, silver, whatever you need to match your project. If you're not sure what size crimp to use with your bead stringing wire, you can always just take a look at the packaging, and usually it tells you a number one crimp and a number two crimp tube. Same on this one, but some of them will vary with the different thicknesses of bead stringing wire. So it's a good idea to match your crimp to the size of bead stringing wire.

So there are several different ways that you can attach crimps to your bead stringing wire. The basic premise is that first just slide your wire through your crimp and then the end of the wire can go through whatever you're using to finish your wire, a wire guardian. It then can go through a part of the clasp or a jump ring. And then you feed the wire back through the crimp. And while the wire is a lying parallel inside the crimp, you can use a variety of different tools, your choice, to flatten the crimp. You can use pliers made just for doing this and you could see that there are two openings in these crimping pliers. One is oval-shaped and one is U-shaped or crescent-shaped. And what you do is first you flatten the crimp with the oval part, and then you put it into the crescent part. And what that does is it makes a davit right there and then you put the shape sideways back into the oval part and squeeze and it will fold it over on to itself. And you always want to double check before you continue with your project. Put a tool on that loop and tug and make sure it's nice and secure. And once it's nice and secure, you can use wire cutters to cut that wire end off very close to the crimp.

And now you have a secure end and then you could slide your beads along the wire, and repeat the crimping and adding the rest of your clasp to the other end. If you don't have special crimping pliers, you can just use chain nose pliers and flatten the crimp. It will take up a little bit more space. It won't look as neat and tidy, but it will get the job done. Again, always make sure that you check before you proceed with your bead stringing. And there's also specialty tools out there like this one. It's called the one step crimper and it actually does this exact shape, but all in one step. And it's a little pricey, but handy to have.

So now that you know how to securely crimp your bead stringing wire, you can be secure in your knowledge that your jewelry isn't going to fall apart.