Hi there. In this video, I'm going to tell you how to wire wrap top-drilled beads. You may have seen them and been perplexed, and I'll show you how simple it is to do.

So in your jewelry-making journey, you will encounter top-drilled beads in lots of different shapes and sizes. This is a glass-faceted teardrop bead by House of Gems, and you can see that the hole, rather than being drilled symmetrically, is drilled across the tip. And so this is called top-drilled. This is a little bicone bead. It may be hard to see, but usually they're drilled, again, from tip to tip so that it's symmetrical. But in this case, the hole is drilled at one of the tips. And then here's a little heart crystal. Again, instead of being drilled through the center, it's drilled at the top. So you need to know how to wire wrap these. Sometimes you could hang them with a jump ring, but sometimes you want something more secure.

Here's another example of a crystal heart, top drilled, and you could see I've done messy wraps on it, which gives it a very interesting look. And I'll cover those in a different video. Here are some of our little hearts, like I just showed you, very neatly wrapped, and they're very secure on their chain. And then you could see there are different ways of doing it, like here's a teardrop, top drilled, and I've left a bit more space here with the wire. And even this leaf shape, that's drilled quite a ways down from one end, but still not in the center. You can deal with that the exact same way I'm going to show you.

So here's my teardrop bead, and here I have a length of 20-gauge wire. Use whatever wire will fit through the holes. If you are using a finer gauge wire, I will show you in a different video how to wire wrap that. Anything less than 22-gauge, you'll have an issue where it actually can pull out. One of the ends of the wire isn't as secure, and it can pull out. In another video, I'll show you how to wire wrap top-drilled beads with fine-gauge wire. But today, our 20-gauge fits beautifully. And here's a tip for you: If you have a bunch to wrap, measure your first piece of wire and overcut it a bit. So I've cut five inches. I know I'm not going to need anywhere near that. And then I'm going to make my wire wraps and measure what's left, and I'll know exactly how much I need. And that way I can cut my wire and not waste it.

So for this one, it's kind of big. I'm going to leave about a half of an inch of wire sticking out one end. And I'm just going to bend both wires up into a U shape, just like that. So they're now perpendicular to the bead hole. Then you're going to bend them again into a triangle, so they meet right over the tip of that bead. Next, use chain nose pliers to grab each wire, right where they cross, and bend it up again. So once more, the wire is perpendicular to the bead hole, and they should be parallel to each other. So it should look like this. Next, I'm going to trim this short end, down to about an eighth of an inch. So trim that. Next, grasp this longer wire so the top of your chain nose pliers are level with the top of that wire you just trimmed, and give it a 90-degree bend. Next, tuck in your round nose pliers, and make a loop of whatever size you need for your project. You'll need to reposition your pliers to finish the loop.

So at this point, if you need to insert this into a piece of chain or another jewelry finding, you'd want to do that before you do the wrapping. So now, hold on to the loop with one pair of chain nose pliers, and hold on to the wire. If you have a nice long length, you can hold onto it with your fingers or use another pair of chain nose pliers. And we're just going to wrap those two pieces of wire, making a nice, neat coil, so that each wrap is right next to the one before it. Just like that. Use wire cutters to trim the excess, and there you have a beautiful, nice, neat wire wrap.

And if I measure this leftover piece of wire, it was five inches to begin with, and now the leftover piece is two. So I know that each of these requires three inches of wire. So if I had four more to do, maybe I'd cut a 12-inch piece of wire, and then there wouldn't be any waste, especially if you're using sterling silver or some kind of precious metal. And any of these beads that are top-drilled, you would wire wrap in the exact same way.

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