Homemade Jewelry Jump Rings are Easy to Make

Step 1

Decide on the thickness and type of wire you want to use. 18 – 20 gauge wire is a good size to start experimenting with. This will make a fairly large jump ring, but it will be handy for many applications. Once you are more familiar with the process you can move on to thinner sized wire.

Step 2

Decide on what color you want the rings. Wire comes in many metallic shades, including some colors. You can go with a normal silver look, a darker silver (think hematite colored) look, gold colored, and many metallic colors such as blue, red, purple and orange.

Step 3

Now that you’ve chosen your wire, pick a cylindrical rod-like object to wrap the wire around. A pen works well and most people have one or two of those kicking around. Other objects that work well are knitting needles and pencil crayons. If you are looking for a very specific size, travel to your local hardware or hobby store and buy wooden dowels in the sizes you prefer.

Step 4

Wrap the wire in a tight coil around your chosen rod. If you only need two or three jump rings, wrap the wire around only three or four times. If you need dozens or rings, wrap around dozens of times. Wrap a few times more than you will need because you cannot use the straight ends on the first and last loop.

Step 5

Remove the wire coil from the rod. With wire cutters, snip off the straight pieces from the ends of the coil. Keep the wire cutters at a right angle to the wire coil so that when you cut through, there is a fairly flat edge and no sharp points.

Step 6

Make a slight bit of room between the first and second coil to make cutting easier. Snip off the first ring at the place where the end of the wire will meet it (so it will make a complete ring when cut off.) Voila! You just made your first homemade jump ring!

Step 7

To tidy things up, try closing the ring tightly together. This is easily done with two sets of flat nosed pliers: one for holding the left edge and one for twisting the right edge until the two edged meet as close as possible. If the edges don’t meet well, it may be because the cutting left the edge jagged. Open up the ring again and try filing each end with a jewelry or metal file. File down any jagged or uneven ends and then try closing the ring again.

Most times you’ll find the edges are fine without any filing.

Step 8

Repeat steps 6 and 7 to the remaining coils of wire until all your jump rings have been created.