Safety pin crafts are simple, easy and fun to do. All you need to do to create pretty pins and bracelets is slip some seed beads onto ordinary safety pins. Teenage girls love to swap safety pin jewelry as expressions of friendship and they also make great gifts for anyone who likes to wear a brooch.
Experienced creators of safety pin crafts recommend coating the outside of safety pins with varnish or a sealer before you start to keep them from tarnishing. Brass pins need to be sprayed with an acrylic sealer to avoid rusting.
While making these beautiful objects, safety pin jewelry experts also closing the heads of pins each time you slip a bead on a pin so that you don’t lose track of your pattern. You can work freehand or from a pattern. If you are using your own pattern, keep in mind that you can mix up large and small safety pins in one design and that small pins can be slid along the bar of a larger safety pin. If you start out using a very large safety pin it saves you the necessity of using a pin backing or jump rings to hold the overall design together.
Safety pins come in different sizes. When constructing safety pin crafts it might be valuable to know just how many seed beads each safety pin will hold. A safety pin that is 7/8 of an inch long will hold eight seed beads. A safety pin that is 1 1/16 inches long typically holds ten seed beads.
It is also important to consider that a safety pin that is more than 1 1/16 inches long is usually too wide to hold seed beads. It will hold larger beads or buttons to create even different styles of safety pin crafts. A safety pin of this size however will hold up to 10 beaded safety pins. A safety pin that is 1 3/4 inches long will hold up to 12 beaded safety pins and you can slide up to fourteen beaded safety pins on a safety pin that is two inches long.
One trend in making safety pin crafts is using black safety pins instead of the usual brass, silver or gold safety pins. If you are interested in making safety pin jewelry using black safety pins, you can order gunmetal black ones in different sizes from Richard the Thread, Dept. SN, 8320 Melrose Ave., No. 201, West Hollywood, CA 90069.
You can purchase seed beads for safety pin jewelry at craft stores. The sizes of the holes in seed beads greatly vary from bead to bead. It is usual to buy a batch of seed beads only to discover that you have to discard some because they won’t slide onto the safety pin. As a rule of thumb, buy more seed beads than you think you will actually need for your safety pin crafts.