Wire, Bead & Sequin Decorations

Get your favourite Christmas movie on, hot chocolate, popcorn and craft the night away.

My tree needs NO more decorations - I have to display half in bowls and glasses around my flat I have so many, but I was after something to keep me busy as I watched some more Channel 5 made-for-tv bad Christmas movies - and these were perfect.  I'm doubling them up as gift tags, hanging around the house and I might start my own craft bombing and hang them all over Buckinghamshire.

What I Used:

Beading Wire [20ga thick craft wire for the base, 28ga thick beading wire for the decoration]

Range of Beads and Sequins
Jewellery Pliers [optional]

I decided to go with two basic shapes for my decorations: stars and hearts - classic [and easy].

With the thickest beading wire I own [20ga craft wire], I moulded outlines of hearts and stars.

If you have a template or item in a similar shape to the decoration you would like to create, use them to help guide your wire if you would like to have some uniformity in the decorations or to help bend and shape the wire in place.  I used wooden shapes that were easy to mould the wire around:

Cut the wire at the finish with a short overlap - you can then bind the overlap together with
 the next stages.  Next, I took my much thinner beading wire [28ga beading wire], attached the end
 to the shape and threaded some sequins and beads:

In a fairly random way, I began wrapping the wire around the shape, winding each one in a slightly different direction and adding one or two beads at a time to each wrap. I continued wrapping the wire around until I was happy with the look and finally created a loop at the top of the star to finish:

To finish the decorations, I used silver and gold thread to compliment the beads and sequins:

Wrapping the thread around the hearts and stars, I created more detail and a little more texture, making the lines of wire more bold and adding extra detail where a little more was needed:

To finish, I threaded silver thread through the loops created with the craft wire to hang, but you could also use this technique to thread bows through to hang on the tree:

Simple but classic decorations that should fit in no matter what crazy theme I decide on each year!
see you next time x