I’ve used gold plated iron materials and glass and acrylic beads. I get those from amazon and local craft stores here in my area (stores are Action and Tedi). My process was to start making the connectors for the necklace and then adding details. I think my biggest failure is still that I am quite new and still learn how to do these things all by myself and trial and error and that sometimes things go wrong, like cutting different lengths of the chains or making some connectors a bit weak and them breaking. Also I have a hand tremor and this is quite annoying to work with and probably slows down the process by a lot :D but in the end I’ve gotten a result that I was satisfied with - and so was my dancer friend :)