Finding Perfect Accent Pieces

You may wear trendy fashion jewelry with stones of a color to match your clothing. You may also choose to wear jewelry with colored stones based on the color's meaning and how it makes you feel. The color green has always been associated with the environment and nature and can help you relax as it is a refreshing and calming color. People in the Middle Ages wore green to symbolize fertility. If you don't have any green jewelry, you can make your own easily with some crafting and simple jewelry-making supplies. Here are the instructions to make a sparkling, green cracked-marble bracelet.

To make your green cracked-marble bracelet, you will need:

• Cookie sheet
• Metal tongs
• Package of green-colored glass marbles or clear glass marbles and green nail polish
• Package of bead caps
• Package of eye pins
• Package of jump rings
• Bracelet clasp
• E-6000 craft glue
• Pair of jewelry pliers

Crack Your Marbles

First, you will need to give the marbles a shattered look by heating them and quickly cooling them in an ice bath. This causes the marble's interior to expand in the heat, then quickly contract from the cold, which results in a marble full of cracks but still intact. 

Spread the marbles on the baking sheet and place it in a 500 degrees F pre-heated oven for 20 minutes. While the marbles are being heated, fill a mixing bowl with water and ice. 

After twenty minutes, remove the cookie sheet with the marbles from the oven. One by one, pick up the marbles with the tongs and drop them into the ice water. Let the marbles cool for approximately ten minutes, then remove them from the water and dry them on a towel. 

If you can't find any green marbles, you can use colorless glass marbles for this project. After you have baked and cooled them, dry them off and paint them with green-colored nail polish.

Construct Your Bracelet

A bracelet can be from four inches to nine inches in length, depending on the size of your wrist. As a general rule, measure the circumference of your wrist and add one-half inch to find how much your bracelet's length needs to be. Each marble bead you make will be approximately one inch in length, so for a seven-inch bracelet, you will need to make approximately seven beads. As you make your marble bracelet, you can add extra marbles or remove them to adjust its size.

For each marble, you will need two bead caps and two eye pins. Each bead cap will be concave to fit around the outside of a bead. The bottom of the bead cap is the part of the cap that rests against the bead. 

Thread the eye pin down through the top of the bead cap. Snip off a section of the bottom of the eye pin's length so only 1/2 inch remains on the eye pin. Bend the remaining bottom length section of the eye pin into a loop so it fits inside the underside of the bead cap. Using E-6000 glue, apply a generous amount of adhesive to the underside of the bead cap and hold it in place until it is secure. 

Repeat this process with the second eye pin and bead cap, adhering it to the opposite end of the marble. Set the bead aside to dry completely. This will create one bead link for your bracelet. Repeat this process for the rest of your marbles to make enough beads for the length of your bracelet.

When all the beads have dried, connect them together with the jump rings. With the pliers, bend each jump ring apart and use it to connect two beads together, then bend the jump ring back together. When you have connected all the beads in a string, use the pliers to attach the bracelet clasp to complete your bracelet.

Wear your sparkling, green marble bracelet.