How to Make An Adorable Mummy & Daughter Matching Bracelet Set

In today’s project, I’m making an adorable mummy & daughter matching bracelet set… thanks to prompting by my 8-year old daughter!

Click here for a quick overview of the full Grandma, Mommy and Me bracelet & keyring set!

Musings on Jewellery Taste

I’ve been musing recently about how my taste in jewellery has changed over the years. If I go back to when I was younger (read: a lot younger!), I had a phase of being into quite heavy statement jewellery. I especially favoured stuff that showed I was angry. (I mean, I thought I was angry… I wasn’t really a particularly angry teenager!). I’ll dig some out for a future post.

As I’ve grown older, my taste has turned towards elegant, simple pieces, with the occasional more eclectic piece thrown in. And now that my daughter is a little older and starting to show an interest in jewellery, I find my tastes slowly changing again.

Turning into a Family Affair…

As my interest (obsession) in jewellery has started to ramp up recently, my daughter has been picking up on pieces of conversation around the house. She likes to look at my new pieces when I’ve made them. I typically make jewellery after she’s gone to bed, so it’s like Christmas… she goes to bed and bam! The next morning, a new piece of something shiny has appeared! Anyway, a couple of days ago, after I’d finished a necklace, she told me (with a very serious face on) that I should “make one for selling, one for me and one for her”. She’s a genius, that girl!

Last night, I got thinking that I should probably make her something… I usually make her knitted jumpers or sew her dresses. This is quite a different make and on the whole, I’ve not made her any jewellery because she’s never been interested. And like any 8-year old, she’s rubbish at looking after her stuff! So, before she went to bed, I grabbed a tape measure and measured her wrist (13cm! Dinky!). Since, I’m still on a wire jewellery kick, I’ve had a look around on the Internet for ideas for a cute wire jewellery bracelet.

Source of Inspiration

I happened to come across this YouTube video by CSL Designs: Heart Link Wirework Chain. It’s great and very digestible at just under 20 minutes long.

The heart shaped links are perfect for my daughter. I wouldn’t really describe my daughter as girlie – she trains in Taekwondo and plays an inordinate amount of video games. But she really does like pink and unicorns and hearts. Which has set me off down the path of re-visiting my pink and hearts and unicorn phase. I had a couple of these phases during my life… probably around the same age as my daughter, a re-visit when I was in my early 20s and another one not long after she was born.

With no real idea about how to make this bracelet, I watched the video a couple of times and then set to work – the concept of the wire heart link is pretty similar to a beaded chain link or rosary link (check out my Multi-Strand Bracelet for a description). Up until now, I’ve been using 24-gauge wire to make my chain links, I like the delicate look, but when you’re giving the bracelet to an 8-year old, you’ve got to do something to make it a bit sturdier! So I opted for a 20-gauge copper wire.

The Technique

For the heart chain link, you’re basically doing the following:

• Make a loop
• Wrap the wire to secure it
• Thread on a bead
• Make a loop on the other end
• Wrapping the wire to secure the end

The main difference is that you’re shaping one of the loops into a heart. That said, it was tricky!

As I said, I like delicate jewellery and my daughter has quite small wrists, so I wanted to make the hearts quite small. Well, I had all sorts of problems with trying to thread the links together because the loop at the centre of the heart was quite small and I hadn’t considered the size of the loop vs. the thickness of the wire. But I persevered and succeeded in the end.

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Making the Clasp

It’s All in the Planning!

With the clasp all done, I tried to attach it to the bracelet… and learnt the most important lesson of all… it’s all in the planning!

For this bracelet, I didn’t do any sketching. I also didn’t consider what the final piece would look like beyond a rough idea. You can tell I’m out of practice, right? In the past, I would have sketched an idea and thought about it for a while. Just to make sure I knew how I was going to approach the make.

Because I’m trying to cram as much making in at night, as I can, I have just been going at my jewellery making with a bit of a gung-ho attitude. So the long and short of it was that I couldn’t get the tiny little loop in the heart chain link to fit over the 18-gauge wire clasp. In the end, I figured I’d just try to make the heart loop bigger, whilst keeping the heart shape. Haha, that was a bad idea! I really mangled that heart quite badly… But eventually, I succeeded in getting it on! It’s not perfect, but it’ll do…

Finished, But Not Quite

I was finished, or so I thought. After staring at the bracelet for a while, I decided it was too short. Yes, I really should have planned and tried it on my little model, except she was fast asleep in bed. At least, theoretically. Whatever I did, I couldn’t get the bracelet to sit right. In the end, I concluded that I needed an extra link… and of course, that presented a host of new problems. It was definitely not as simple as creating a new link and adding it on! I’ll do my best to explain the problem.

The heart chain link requires you to shape the heart side first. Maybe there’s a way to do it in reverse, but I’m not that good yet… Then the heart end hooks onto the loop end from the previous link. Herein lies the problem, I had already closed the loop of my previous link as I thought I’d finished the chain. And after all the problems with trying to get the clasp attached to the bracelet, I really didn’t fancy trying to take it off and re-attach it.

I figured I’d be smart and shape the heart loop around the chain loop. So I started bending the heart shape, and before closing it off, I threaded the chain on. It really didn’t work – it seemed impossible for me to get the new link to sit properly against the rest of the bracelet. I tried for about 10 minutes, before I gave up and removed the clasp. I should have done that to start with… it took a couple of minutes to remove the clasp, thread on my new chain link and then reattach the clasp!

The Real Final Piece

From start to end, this piece (including learning how to make the links and clasp in the first place) took me about 1.5 hours to make. It’s a nice, quick make and I think the final bracelet looks quite effective:

I think it’s quite sweet!

And Then Mummy Wanted One…

After another couple of hours, I’d made a Mummy sized bracelet, and the final set looked like this:

I gave the bracelet to my daughter yesterday and she loved it! It went straight on, and I think made homeschooling with Mummy a little bit easier to handle!

And just in time for Mother’s Day, too!

If you’d like to see my learning process for this bracelet, then why not take a wander and have a look at my video “Making a Mother & Daughter Heart-link Wire Wrap Bracelet Set” on my YouTube channel? I’m adding new videos all the time – I’d love to hear your thoughts! Please do share your comments with me! And don’t forget to “like” and “subscribe” to stay up-to-date with my latest projects!

PS – I also added a keyring to this set for my Mum, so it later became a “3 generations Grandma, Mummy & Daughter” set! Check it out here!