Thrift Store Beading - Finding the Good Stuff for Jewelry Making

You can find great beads at craft stores, gem shows, or on-line outlets.  However, if you are just starting to make jewelry or are a budget-conscious experienced jewelry designer, you may want to find a cheaper alternative for finding the valuable beads you crave.  Thrift stores often sell jewelry for really low prices and you have the benefit of helping a charity.  You may find a good piece you love to wear as is.  More likely, you will find a broken necklace, stuff with a few chipped stones, something missing clasps, or perhaps a badly constructed piece - all with some really great beads.  You can recycle these thrift store finds by cleaning and re-purposing the beads into new trendy necklaces with other beads in your stock or turn them into stretch or wrap bracelets.  Your jewelry making can then produce some fashionable new item for yourself, a special piece to give as a gift, or if you craft for extra income - an addition to your sales table.  

As an example of this idea, a few months back, I found some Hubei turquoise beads in some really ugly necklaces at the thrift store.  One necklace was short and extremely heavy (about 2 pounds), the other was free-form bead nuggets rounded and polished.  Both necklaces had a few chipped or cracked stones.  Since the store was having an extra discount sale that day, I decided to buy them and re-construct them into something more wearable.  I also thought I could use the bad beads to test some of the various stone polishing techniques I had seen on hobby sites.  I had also bought  a multi-strand necklace featuring green African turquoise on another trip to re-create into something new as well.  

Over the last 2 weeks, we have had several days of freezing rain, sleet, or snow, so I decided to start on my turquoise projects. I started by creating 2 traditional Southwest looks of graduated necklaces with the disc/tire beads and modernizing it with contrasting-color round beads as spacers/finishers.  Using all the disc beads still made the necklaces too heavy, so I left out the largest beads of each color and ended up with necklaces that weighed around a quarter-of-a-pound each.  Then I took two of the strands from the multi-strand necklace and combined them to create a longer southwest-style nugget  and chip necklace.  Since I still had beads leftover,  I thought I'd try a mixed nugget and disc necklace that would feature the matrix on the larger tire beads by treating them like a donut bead.  They were TOO heavy and broke the wire I used to test my design idea (see middle photo).  Instead, I decided to try wire-wrapping and corded necklaces for some boho-chic looks featuring the blue or green colored disc beads as focal points.  Finally, I took the miniature turquoise colored round beads layer on the multi-strand and combined it with small glass pearls to create a choker-length necklace. Details on each finished piece of jewelry may be found on my Pinterest page (photos of all new in top of this post, photo of original finds in bottom of post)).

After making 7 necklaces and 2 pendants from the original 3 thrift store finds, I still have a short strand of crystal bends, a partial strand of small baroque pearls, and many silver-tone spacers beads to use as spacers in future jewelry or craft projects. I also have 10 polished stones from the bad ones for my rock collection or cactus garden.   I re-purposed the clasps from the two Hubei necklaces in the new ones and will use the chain from the multi-strand in another project later.

Speaking of re-purposing, the chain on the nugget necklace was an old pocket watch chain of my Dad's.  It still had the watch bow attached, so I'm guessing the watch fell and broke when the chain did.  The chain was in a small drawer of my Mom's jewelry box with other broken chain sections.  Before Mom passed, she told me she kept them there for Dad to use for repairing chains or when he needed to replace a clasp.  She said I could keep them or throw them away, so I dumped them in a plastic container because I thought they might be re-purposed as necklace extenders and heavy-weight clasps.