PSU Wire Choker

I consistently seem to have an abundance of broken power supplies and I've always used the wires for various projects, but even then there are still plenty left over. And so I decided to try something different and turn some of them into pieces of 'questionable' jewelry.

Tools & Materials:

• broken power supply
• black felt
• hook & eye fasteners
• clip and chain
• glue gun and glue sticks
• wire cutters
• soldering iron

First of all I started by liberating the wires from the power supply and from the connectors. Once they were free I cleaned the wires and my OCD forced me to arrange them by color.

I wanted the choker to be quite thick so I took 7 wires, laid them next to each other in an organized manner and stuck them together with the hot glue. To make sure the wires wouldn't move I wrapped both ends with insulation tape, then repeated the process twice more.

Next I placed the wire strips next to each other and secured them with tape on the mat. I started interlacing the wire strips but soon found out that the wires wouldn't stay coordinated and would intertwine. To solve this I secured the wires with hot glue after each braid whilst applying pressure.

After braiding, I ended up with a lots of excess glue on the back side of the choker and a possibility of the glue becoming unstuck, so I decided to cover it with black felt. For this I cut two strips of felt wider than the choker, glued it to the back with yet more hot glue and cut off the unwanted edges of felt and glue. This made the choker more comfortable for wearing and the wires will definitely stay in place.

To finish off I cut the choker to size to fit my neck and glued on hook and eye fasteners from an old bra.

I really like how the first choker turned out, but I thought that there must be a better, less messy way to do this. So I got out my soldering iron. I decided to make the second choker a little more subtle than the first and only use 9 wires instead of 21.

To start I laid the wires next to each other and slid the tip of the soldering iron in between the wires to weld them together. Next I secured the wires on the mat with some insulation tape and started braiding. After every two to three braids I slid the soldering iron tip along the wires to make sure that they stayed put.

Next I marked a 30cm section in the middle the choker with some insulation tape and stripped all of the wires after the tape marks at both ends. Because the stripped wires were still quite thick I cut off about 70% of the strands from each wire and interlaced them all together. After that I bent all of the wires but one and cut off the leftovers. I used the last wire to attach the clip onto one side and the chain on the other side. And lastly I cut four smaller pieces of felt and glued them onto both sides of the choker with hot glue to cover the wire ends.

I really like how both of the chokers turned out and so I decided to use leftover wires for some bracelets. I only wish I though of the soldering iron before I started the first choker, since that proved to be much quicker and definitely less messy :D