Transcript
Now that our T-shirts are prepped and we’re sure that we have enough fabric to work with to make our necklaces, it’s time to start cutting the strips out of the T-shirts to make our necklace. Today we’re going to make a beaded necklace, and I want to think about that as I’m cutting. I want the strips to be thin enough that I can actually string beads on them, but not so thin that the necklace will fall apart.
So, take your T-shirt, and, again, I like to fold things in half or in quarters even to make them easier to work with as you’re cutting. You’re just going to lay your iron piece of fabric, your T-shirt, down on the table and kind of eyeball straight lines. Or, you can use a water soluble marker to mark your lines out straight.
Take some good, nice, sharp scissors and start cutting strips. Go ahead and cut down as many strips as you need for as many strands as you want on your necklace. So, we cut off the bottom portion. We’re not going to use it because we don’t want to use this hemmed edge here. It’s too thick.
And I’m just going to eyeball about half an inch wide for these beads. If you’re working with a pony bead, which has a wider opening, you can go ahead and try and do a little bit of a thicker width on your strips, and that will be easy to string. If you’re working with a thicker strip it’s nice, too, because as you bead things the beads will kind of stay in place in various locations instead of falling all down to the bottom. It makes for a really interesting piece.
We’re going to go ahead and keep cutting our strips. Each one of these strips is one strand on our necklace. Once we unfold this you’ll see that it’s all one piece, a full strand together. We’re going to make about five strands for our necklace which will look really cute once we have all of our beads on.
Now we have our five strips cut. You’ll notice that when you unfold them it is one continuous loop. What we want to do next is to stretch our loops out. In stretching the fabric we’re going to take care of those imperfections on the cut edges that we made, because, as you can see, once you stretch this knit fabric it wants to curl in on itself. So, if you’re a little bit zig zaggy with your cut, a little uneven, it’s no big deal. It’s going to be hidden anyway.
At this point you can go ahead and finish this necklace. We have a really great T-shirt necklace right here. We’re going to go ahead next and show you how to make a beaded necklace.
