Bar necklaces and pretty much all geometric pendants and jewelry have been really hot this season. There are so many different ways you can design them and they look great on just about anybody. The best thing is that they are easy to make in bulk, and they aren’t too difficult to make. We are going to show you a few different kinds of them, including different tricks and techniques you can use to make your designs stand out.
The Simple Bar necklace:
These are the standard plain bar necklaces which come in different sizes, metals, and colors. You would engrave a name or message on the smooth flat bar with no stones, but the diamond ones are pretty much ready to wear. These pretty much make the designs for themselves, but we can still add some tiny accents where the chain connects to the bar. You can do it by wire wrapping a small faceted bead, or just putting a bead directly on the chain and have it go down to the bottom.
Wire wrapped Bar Necklace
Another type of bar necklace is one where you take beads and wire wrap them together. What we do is basically take a wire and wrap it to chain, then add the beads and close it on the other side. Hard wire is better than soft wire in this case because it will hold its shape. This method gives you a little bit more room to create because there are so many different types of beads you can use. Whatever shape, size, material, or color bead, you name it. The bar also doesn’t need to be perfectly straight, you can also bend the wire into a little arch or even bend it hard to make angled shapes like triangles.
Divider Necklace
The last trick I have is using parts that are meant for other things but can be used in our design. A great example is dividers which are usually used to create spacing in multi-strand bracelets and necklaces. For bar necklaces, multi-strand dividers are great. They are already the shape we want them, they have holes, and no one that I know is using this method yet although maybe that will change after this post! For our bar necklaces, we will take dividers and just use headpins to create loops and connect to the chains. You can also drop pendants from them like this. So simple, but it looks great and why make things more difficult when you have all the parts in front of you already?
As always, jewelry design is all about coming up with different combinations of beads and findings that work well together. You can use some of the tricks we showed you in this video and adapt them to your own style. Share your designs with us on and we might feature you in future blogs with a link to your page! Have fun with this, till next time!
-Cyrus Nemani, Gempacked