Some days ago I tried to make a bolotie by myself. It is far easier to create some kind of jewelry (is a bolotie jewelry??) for girls or women than for men. But somehow I came up with this idea.

Anyways.. here is some step-by-step report of making the bolotie.

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First of all I was searching the web for different pictures of boloties. After I had studied them for some time I had some kind of idea of what I would need. I knew that I would need some leather cord and I decided that I would make a base out of beads, using the peyote technique.

But only something out of beads wasn’t enough. I needed something fancy. Eye-catching. Something to add to the base of beads. I read in my handicraft books and I looked through all my materials. I came up with some different stones, something cabochon-like as you can see on the picture below. But nothing really convinced me.

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But then I found something fitting: It was an old brooch. Actually for women but I decided that I could also use it for a men’s bolotie in this case.

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Of course I couldn’t just use it like this. As it was a brooch I had to remove the pin. Luckily this was easy, I was able to break it with pliers and afterwards just had to rasp the rests. It worked out a lot better than I had expected.

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The next step was to create the clasp for holding the leather cords on the back of the bolotie. After I had checked some photos on the internet I came up with this:

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On the left had side you can see the brooch glued to the beaded base next to the clasp. I used juwelry glue.

But I was not satisfied yet, something was missing. Therefore I made something else out of beads using the peyote technique again and added it to the brooch. My main problem here was to adjust it symmetrically. Afterwards I was really unsure about my work. Two main qestions were bothering me: 1. Was this really fitting for a man to wear? Or did it look more like a women’s jewelry? And 2. Which way was the way to wear it?

I took the following  2 photos and sent them to some friends and family members:

The answer to the first question was clear: Yes, a man can wear it. The second question wasn’t as clear as the first but after I had asked some people the majority had decided that it should be worn upright as in the picture on the right.

Now there was only one thing missing: The leather cord with endings. And this is what it looked like in the end:

I hope you’ll like it as well 🙂

Please excuse any weird words or wordings.. I have never described something like this in English before so unfortunately I was missing some “specialist terms”  😉 .