DIY: rope necklace

A few weeks ago I spotted the above necklace by 3.1 Phillip Lim while shopping online (here) and decided it would make the perfect addition to my Spring wardrobe.  However, once I spotted the $225 price tag, I thought, "...psssh, I could make that myself!"  And so I did.

I headed to some local bead shops (if you live in NYC, go to the trimming district around 37th Street between 5th and 6th Avenue, there are a ton of bead and trimming stores all within a few steps of each other!  M&J Trimming is my favorite though!) with a print-out of the necklace in tow to purchase the necessary materials...

I started by feeding the smaller-widthed rope through the shorter curved tubes.  I used scotch tape to tightly bound the ends of the rope so it was as thin as possible to more easily slide through the tubes.  For the longer curved tube, I was unable to push the rope all the way through, because of its thickness, so I wound up using the grey rope instead.  If I were to do it again, I would have ordered wider beads online (this was the widest they had at every store I went to) but since I'm more of an instant satisfaction type girl, I made do with what i had.

After I had one grey rope and one white rope strung through the curved beads, I taped the ends of both sides together, again binding as tightly and compactly as possible to feed them trough the shorter straight beads on each side.  I then knotted the grey ropes around the white ones by repeatedly typing simple loop knots in the same direction, similar to the method used to make friendship bracelets.  Once the sides were even in length, I taped them again to be fed through the last set of beads.

The next step was to add the pearls, which I did by cutting the strands I bought into smaller pieces, equal in length to the exposed sections of white rope that I'd be attaching them to.  I used white thread to sew through the string of the pearls, into the rope and back again–a few times for each space between pearls, to make sure everything was secure.  The last step is to add the clasps and secure the loose ends with leftover pieces of grey rope–then you're finished!  The project was even easier than I imagined and I couldn't be happier with the result!  Here's the side-by-side comparison with Phillip's on the left and mine on the right... what do you think?