DIY Kanzashi Hair Sticks with Tombo-dama Lampwork Beads

I bought a Tombo-dama Kanzashi (Japanese lampwork glass bead hair pin) from Wargo, but even though there was a fairly big range of them I still couldn’t quite find the one. So I decided to buy Kanzashi blanks and look for Tombo-damas in Kyoto to make my own Kanzashi hair pins.

Materials

Materials list:

• 1 tombo-dama lampwork bead
• 1 kanzashi holder (とんぼ玉用 ホルダーかんざし A )
• 2 cushion ring (ユザワヤ・とんぼ玉用 クッションリング S)

Not many places sold ~2cm lampwork beads with depth in the designs, until I found these beautiful Tombo-damas in a sourvenir shop in Kyoto’s Sanjo Teramachi shopping street for about 1000~1200yen each.

To turn the tombo-damas into a kanzashis, I bought “holder kanzashi” blanks and cushion rings from my favourite craft store, Yuzawaya. (Kiwa Seisakusho and Okadaya didn’t have this type of kanzashi blanks.)

Assembly

The tombo-dama beads happened to be perfect size (just under 2cm) for the kanzashi stick, so assembly was very simple. Slider below shows the 5 steps involved.

In the photo below, on the bottom-left is a kanzashi I bought in a store, and the kanzashi I made is on the top-right – there’s practically no difference at all!

Next up, how to go about making a kanashi with a smaller tombo-dama?

Using smaller Tombo-dama

Way back in March 2019, I made a tombo-dama in a lampwork glass bead workshop at Kobe Lampwork Glass Museum. Today, I finally got to turn it into a hair accessory!

As my lampwork bead was smaller than the space for the tombo-dama, additional spacers were used to fill out the kanzashi holder stick:

Full materials list:

• 1 tombo-dama lampwork bead
• 1 kanzashi holder (とんぼ玉用 ホルダーかんざし A )
• 1 cushion ring (ユザワヤ・とんぼ玉用 クッションリング S)
• 1 metal ring (ユザワヤ・甲丸リング内3mm)
• 1 metal cube bead (メルヘンアート・ハイクオリティメタルビーズ4mm AC1430シルバー)

Steps:

Doggie is happy with the completed Kanzashis 😀

Final notes

Overall the cost of hand making (or rather, assembling) a Kanzashi was a little less than half that of purchasing a made-in-Japan completed one. The look and feel of the homemade Kanzashis are identical to store-bought ones, especially when the size of the bead is optimal to the stick.

There’s an additional bonus with home made Kanzashis using these blanks I used; you can switch the tombo-dama beads at any time by simply unscrewing the tip and re-assembling the Kanzashi!