Girl's Day Kanzashi

When I was growing up I would spend many evenings glued in front of the TV watching Japanese television shows like Abarenbo Shogun and I was fascinated with the elaborate costumes of the women.  My all time favorites were the beautiful hair sticks that had little flowers dangling down that swayed with movement.  While looking through the various beads we sell at Ben Franklin Crafts, I was inspired to make one because surely I wasn't the only one that admired this style of hair accessory, luckily I found everything I needed to do just that!

Here are the supplies I used:

Craft wire in 20 and 22 gauge, a 10 petal flower filigree by Kiwa, 8/0 seed beads, a 2 inch barrette, 4 head pins, small plastic flowers, 6mm plastic round beads, and mini leaf sequins.

I also picked out a really blingy bead from one of these packs as my focal bead.

I decided to use a barrette because not everyone has long hair but you could easily substitute a hair stick instead, we carry them in 5 or 7 inch length in our bead shop.  The barrette has one end where you pinch to open up the backing, the opposite end is where you will want to attach the ornamental portion to make it more user friendly.  Starting from that end of the barrette, I used Fabri-tac to glue on the mini leaf sequins.  The sequins have a hole at the base of each leaf so I aligned that hole with the hole on the end of the barrette at my starting point because later I will wire wrap my ornament there.  I had my sequins slightly overlapping as I worked across the barrette to fully cover the metal and to get a good saturation of color.  I set this on the side to dry as I worked on the ornament portion of the piece.

For each chain of flowers, I started with a head pin and strung on a 8/0 seed bead, a 6mm round, and a small flower.  I trimmed the end of the pin so that I would have slightly less then 1/2 inch of wire and then used my round nose pliers to make a simple loop, of course you can wire wrap the end if you prefer.
I used 22 gauge wire for the rest of the links, each link consisting of a 6mm round and a small flower.  I did simple loops with this just to keep it easy, wire wrap if you prefer but keep in mind that it will increase the overall length in your end result. I used 4 links per chain but you can adjust the amount of links depending on how long or short you want the end result to be.  I made a total of 5 chains in this way and attached 4 at various points along the perimeter of the filigree flower.  For the 5th chain I used 20 gauge wire to attach to the end with a simple loop, strung on a 6mm round, a small flower, another 6mm round, went up through the center of the filigree, strung on my focal bead and then another 6mm round.  From here I wire wrapped it to the end of the barrette.

These beads come in a pretty good selection of colors so you could easily change up the palette for your favorite girl to give her on Girl's Day!  This would also be a good project for Obon Season!

I'll be doing a demonstration on this on Saturday February 25 at 2:00 in our Mapunapuna Bead shop so come by if you want to check it out!

Thanks for stopping by and I'll see you at the store!

Lynn H.
Mapunapuna Bead Shop