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When making jewellery, you tend to need a few supplies in your material’s box. Beads, cord, wire, scissors, and fasteners are the obvious ones, but what about the less obvious jewellery making supplies? Before you get started making jewellery for the first time, you’re going to need a trip to the craft store to pick up a few jewellery making supplies, and put them in your beading box. Firstly, you are going to need a good pair of pliers. Not the type you can find in a tool box—a specific type of crafting pliers. These pliers are called needle-nose for their long, tapered off tips that look a little bit like tusks. Needle nose pliers are useful for a variety of things—shaping wire, holding large beads steady, keeping things tight, and cutting off tough pieces of plastic, if by chance, you get plastic beads with a few sharp bits left on the edges. With their variety of uses, they are a useful addition to anyone’s kit. You can pick them up for fairly cheap at any craft store, in the jewellery making supplies section. Another great pair of pliers that are a must have are crimpers, which also work for cutting wire. They can also be used to flatten out wire, if you need to turn it and are having a tough time with its current shape. While they are also found in the jewellery making supplies section, sometimes you are lucky and you find them together with needle nose pliers in a set. Some stores are even selling two-in-one pliers these days, with both a crimping edge and needle nose ends, so you can use one tool for a multitude of jobs. This two-in-one tool tends to be a bit more expensive than buying both of them, so decide what is best for you and your budget. For a tool that not everyone has heard of, a bead knotter tool is useful if you are working with smaller beads on silk and polyester thread. The knotter tool holds a bead in place while you make a firm knot right next to it, allowing you to secure a bead in place perfectly every time. Unlike the pliers above, this tool is rarer and a bit more expensive, but well worth it if you want to make sure your beads don’t slip and slide all over the thread. Sometimes, the most frustrating thing with beads is finding that different beads have different sized holes that don’t always match up. That’s where a bead reamer comes in—it can shape and bore holes in beads, and help you get all those different beads on one chain without having to struggle with scissors and knifes and potentially hurt yourself. A bead reamer can be bought for less than £20, and one should always wear safety goggles when using it. Finally, one important thing for any beader is a good bead mat. Pouring beads right on a table will make them fall over, and you might lose some of your possibly expensive beads. Bead mats come in a variety of shapes and sizes—some are coated with a sticky coating to keep those beads on the table, others come with rulers printed on them to help with measuring. They can all be found for differing prices, so it’s best to go with supplies fits you best. There are a few essential jewellery making supplies that are needed within your material box and this article looks at them in more detail. Jewellery making products are available from retailers like Cooksongold
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