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Upcycled Bangles

I guess I’m on a bracelet kick this week.  I ran across some old metal bangles over the weekend.  They were inexpensive to begin with, and a little beat up because they were well-loved a few years ago.  But rather than toss them, I thought I’d give them a little facelift.

I “made” these out of  wire, some skinny bangles stacked together, and a little bead chain.

I wasn’t quite sure what I was going for when I got started, I just started playing.  My camera battery also died while I was playing, so this won’t be a full tutorial or anything, but if you happen to like the looks of these, or they spark an idea of your own, I’ll try to explain what I did. :)

For the red one, I just stacked three silver bracelets together, wound some red bead chain around it, and wrapped it with wire between each bead to secure it.  This sounds easier that it was to get started – I found pretty quickly that I needed to attach the bracelets together to get it to stay put.  So I secured it with a little bit of wire in a couple spots before I got started:

That made wrapping so much easier.

At this point, I have no more in-progress photos.  But I was having fun playing, so I kept going.  I did opt to wrap a second round of wire on this bracelet because I liked the looks of it.

Then I tried this one, which I don’t like as well, but it works with the others.

This one was just using both silver and Vintaj brass wire, wrapped in different directions on three black bracelets stacked together, about 5 or 6 times around.  I use 24 and 26 gauge wire.

Then I found myself with two silver and two black bangles left.  So I decided to combine them, and I did a simple, snug wrap in a couple places to hold them together.

When you’re wrapping tightly like this, it’s easy to pull too tight.  In this case, that would just mean pulling the bracelets on top of each other instead of holding them neatly side-by-side.  So where I wrapped, I held the bracelets in place with my plastic-coated pliers and wrapped close to them.

Then, to smooth the wire out, I used my regular pliers to smash it nice and flat. :)

I think I like this one the best. :)

So, nothing fancy today, just playing with things I already had to give them a new look!

Have you upcycled anything recently?

I link up to these great parties!
~ Adrianne

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  2. Jen..The Butterfly Effect says

    This is just gorgeous!! I should try this sometime!!! :) Thanks for the creative post :) xxoo

    Reply

  5. Pam says

    These are great! Thanks for visiting my blog and telling me about your link party! I have linked my SW Chicken Soup (and now I'm hungry from looking at some of the other links!) I am a new linky follower.

    Reply

  14. Lish says

    I LOVE THIS! So easy and I have a million of these barcelets around, well I used too as Grayson has taken most of them for himself! LOL! I'm pinning this right now!

    Reply

  15. Terry says

    Very nice. I'm trying to do something similar in idea. I have a bunch of broken chains that I was trying to get to look good. So far I haven't achieved it, lol.

    Reply

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