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Medical jewelry, plain and fancy, part 2

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Table of contents for Making medical jewelry fancy

  1. Medical jewelry, plain & fancy, part 4

The easiest thing you can do to make a plain bracelet fancier is to change the chain the emblem is attached to.

For this project you’ll need a small but sturdy wire cutter, two small pliers, a chain of your choice, a clasp, and, optionally, a fairly large and sturdy jump ring to fasten the clasp to.

MedicAlert chains are firmly attached, so getting the original chain off takes a bit of muscle.  Begin by cutting the jump ring that fastens the bracelet to the emblem (not the chain itself, just that one ring).  Twist the cut ends in opposite directions with your pliers (don’t pull the ends of the ring apart to open it up or you’ll never get it back together again).  As soon as the ring is open enough to slip the chain through it, do that.  You don’t need to open the link wide enough to get it off the emblem.

Once that’s done, lay the chain on a table and measure the new chain, with its clasp attached, to match the length of the old one.  If you want to make the bracelet tighter or looser at this time, you can, but if you shorten the chain make sure it’s still long enough that the emblem can still be flipped over on your wrist easily.

If your clasp is large enough, you can just hook it through the opening in the emblem.  Otherwise you will want to add a good solid jump ring to clasp to (nothing flimsy here, you want the bracelet to stay on).  Take this into consideration when you’re figuring out the length of your chain.

Once that’s done, slip the new chain into the opened jump ring on the emblem and twist the ends of the ring together again.  Twist them just a little past being even with each other and then pull them back into alignment.  That’s the easiest way to make it straight.

And there you have it.  As you can see in the picture, I used inexpensive chain for this modification and that turned out to be a bad idea, because the thin gold plating wore off quickly to reveal the dull brass underneath.  I’ve reworked this bracelet into something a lot more attractive and I’ll show you that in a later post.  The illustration is just to show you how a simple chain change can look.

Hope you'll recommend my posts via your favorite social media. Just don't copy the material as your own.

Author: infmom

Otherwise known as Infamous Mom.

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