Wire Wrapped Chain Bracelet with Beads Jewelry Making Project          Page 3

Step 7:  Position two pegs in your jewelry making jig, about 1" apart as shown at right.  Place the loop in your wire segment on peg 1 and grasp the wire with your bent chain nose pliers just inside peg 2.  Bend the wire 90 degrees at that point as shown.  Do this for all 16 segments of wire.

Step 8:  At this point our directions change slightly.  This step we perform on one wire segment only.  We are beginning to make our chain and this will be the first link in the chain.  Using your round nose pliers make a loop in the wire as shown at left.  Use the same procedure as we performed in step 4, but we should have more unused wire at the end.  We will use this unused wire in a later step.  Try to make the loop the same size as the loop in step 4. 

Step 9:  Now we need to bend the link into essentially a "U" shape.  We do this by grabbing the link in the center using our Fine Step Jaw Pliers.  Use the middle step in the pliers.  Position the wire segment so that the unused wire is on the bottom so that after the "U" shaped bend the unused wire will be on the outside and not between the two loops.  While holding the wire in the position shown at right, push both loops up to form the "U" shaped bend.  When completed, the wire component should appear as shown at left.  In the picture at left, you can not see the "U" shaped bend because it is in the plain of the camera.  You can see that both loops at either end of this wire component are superimposed one on top of the other.  Press these two loops until they stay in contact with one another.  To help even up the overlap of the two loops, insert both loops onto your step jaw pliers as shown below-left. 

Step 10:  To complete this initial link in our chain, we need to wrap the excess wire around the wire component to hold the component closed.  To perform this wrap, hold the wire component in your bent chain nose pliers as shown at left and push the wire tail around the rest of the wire component as shown.  Hold your pliers in your non-dominant hand and push the wire with the thumb of your dominant hand.  Push the wire with your thumb, holding your thumb as close to the pliers as possible so that the wrap is tight.  Continue wrapping the wire until you have about two complete wraps around.  The completed wrap will appear as shown at right.  (Step 16 on page 5 has another view of this step, before wrapping the wire.)