Finally, this past weekend, I put together the necklace that I’ve been thinking about as the perfect accessory for my Ithilien Brocade Jacket.

Celtic Horse on Viking knit chain

I’ve had the pendant for a while (purchased from Crafty Celts), and have been wearing it on a gold chain, but that wasn’t quite right.  It needed something more substantial, and I thought a Viking knit ‘chain’ would be just the thing.

There was just one glitch.  I couldn’t fit a chain through the bail on the bronze pendant!  So the low-level search was on.  I tracked down several bead styles that I thought would work to transition the ends of the chain, and ordered a couple of decorative hook-and-eye pairs.  Then it took a while to track down some 20-gauge gold-colored wire.  By the time I sat down to decide what I was going to use and how I was going to assemble it, I had a nice little array of options.

I had already made the chain, using 26-gauge gold-colored copper wire.  It ended up being long enough that I had to cut off several inches.  And as I surveyed the various components, it was pretty obvious that I had a couple of different colors going on there – the lighter yellow gold and the darker bronze.  Out of necessity, I decided I liked the mix of tones.

First, I threaded one end of a 3″ long piece of 20-ga. wire through several loops at one end of the Viking chain, then slid on one bead.  These particular beads are concave, so they cupped the ends of the chain rather nicely.  Then I slipped on the loop of the hook, wrapped the wire back around itself several times to secure it, and cut it off flush.  I repeated the process with the other end of the chain, paying close attention to match the length of the first end and making sure I got the orientation of the hooks correct.

Closeup of the chain ends and hooks

Next up was the ‘hanger’ that would go through the bail.  After trying out a few ideas, I opted for the simplest of them, and just secured the eyes to either end of the bent wire with wrapped loops.    Then it was just a matter of tweaking the loops a bit to make sure it hung correctly, and it was finished!