Recently I sold a leather eyeglass leash to a customer who contacted me after receiving it saying the ends of her eyeglasses kept slipping out of the rubber eyeglass loops. Apparently her eyeglass ends were quite thin. She liked the leash but needed some sort of revision to the rubber loops to better hold her eyeglasses. And so I asked her to send it back to me and let me work on a solution.
Here is a picture of the type of loop I am talking about - it is a black rubber loop with a gold coil which is able to be slid up and down the loop to accommodate different size eyeglass ends. The problem is that the coil is not all that tight, so if your eyeglass ends are thin like my customer's, they will keep slipping out.
Initially I tried to just make my own wire wrapping and make it more snug, but I really wasn't all that happy with the end result:
What I eventually came up with was using a large hole bead to act as the "stopper" for holding the ends of my customer's eyeglasses. Here is what it ended up looking like:
Much better I think! Now it took a little work figuring out how to get the bead onto the loop. So I am going to share with you how to do this on your own.
1. First remove the coil from the rubber loop.
2. Select your bead - make sure to use a "large hole" bead - this one has a 2mm hole which was perfect. Most beads have a hole about 1mm but that is too small to accommodate the rubber loop. (This is a time my "bead addiction" came in handy - I have lots of beads in my studio and I do mean lots - so I was able to find just the right bead!)
3. Now how to place the bead onto the rubber loop. This was a bit tricky so I experimented to find the right way to accomplish this.
I used a piece of spare wire that I had lying around - I found that 22 gauge wire works the best. Make a small "hook" on the end. To do this, I used my round nose pliers and just bent the end of the wire to form the hook. Make it small enough to get through the hole of your bead. The good thing about 22 gauge wire is that it is easy to bend and mold if you need to adjust the size of your hook. Don't worry about the spiral on the other end of the wire pictured - as I said this was a piece of spare wire I had lying around from when I had been experimenting on making spiral loops.
Slip the "hooked" end of the wire through the bead as pictured:
4. Then place the hook around part of the rubber loop and pull it through the hole of the bead:
5. Here is what your new beaded loop looks like:
And here is what the new loops look like on my customer's leather eyeglass leash:
The great thing about these altered eyeglass loops is that the beads are just snug enough to stay put but can be slid up and down the rubber loop so as to accommodate just about any size of eyeglass ends. I really like the look of these loops too, so am looking at offering this as an option for all my eyeglass leashes.
I sell my eyeglass leashes and chains in one of my two Etsy shops:
EyeglassChainsEtc.etsy.com
So hop on over and take a visit!
