Sleeping Beauty Turquoise Copper Wire-Woven Ring... A Sorta Kinda Tutorial...

I've been making plain little beaded wire-wrapped rings for kids for the past couple of weeks now, but I'm starting to get a little bored, and last night decided to try my hand at a wire-woven ring.

My usual technique to do anything is to start weaving a few wires together and see where they lead me. If nothing else, this gives me any number of specific questions to find the answers for, at which point I hit the books and Internet. There are many wire-woven ring patterns available (all the books I own have at least one ring tutorial in them) and there are copious YouTube tuts both free and for pay.

For a first effort this came out rather nicely, I think. The most interesting thing for me is how that tiny Sleeping Beauty nugget pops and holds its own -- looking twice its real size -- not overpowered in the slightest by all the weaving around it.

I wove a couple of inches in the middle of the wire I'd cut (3 base wires 20 gauge dead soft copper 7-8 inches in length, weaving wire 28 gauge). I picked the particular pattern just because I like it. It might be the Aztec weave. I checked for length on the mandrel, wove a bit more, then slid the bead on one of the wires.

Then I continued weaving 2 and 3 wires at either end, at the same time wrapping and overlapping the woven lengths around the turquoise bead just like making a rosette ring. I didn't want this to get too big and bulky, so once the turquoise was firmly ensconced, I STOPPED. No extra twiddles or anything. I trimmed and tucked all the ends underneath.

And there you have it, a copper wire-woven ring, size 6, Sleeping Beauty turquoise nugget.

You can see how red my middle finger was getting from the wire; my right hand was worse. Time to start taping my fingers to protect them. Or build up some honkin' calluses! (The black spots are from ancient hammer blows, maybe three or four years old.)

I've put the offer on Facebook here, first person who contacts me gets it (determined by time stamp) or it will be available at the market tomorrow. Guess I should put the price, eh? $30, plus shipping.

Thanks for stopping by!

Baroque Peacock Pearl Set...

Sometimes absolute simplicity is the way to go.

Two days ago at the market I sold this peacock baroque and small potato pearl and Swarovski oily green vitrail bicone necklace and earring set. It was another slow mid-winter market for me when one of my occasional customers came by, literally stopped dead in her tracks, took one look and asked where the ATM machine was. How I lovelovelove customers who know what they like, see what they want -- and done.

I got the pearls from Robert Hall Originals in St. George. I'd gone there in December to buy three pounds of copper wire and on a whim threw in this last lonely string of pearls that was calling my name. Not being turkey or mince pie vendors, it was a pretty quiet -- okay, dead -- market for us craft vendors back on December 24th and, as usual, I sat and made jewellery in between the occasional customer.

The graduated baroque pearls themselves were so crazy beautiful, each one a work of art on its own, that there was nothing more needed doing than string, crimp and pick out a clasp. (Apologies for the quality of the photograph.)

Oh, yes -- the copper I got? I'm romping through it at a ferocious rate. Check out my previous posts to see what I've been doing with all that lovely, mooshy dead soft copper.

Thanks for stopping by!

Working On A New Wire-Weaving Skill...

The other day I opened Pearl Blay's Beading Gem post on How to Make a Swirling Double Wire Pendant by Making It Easy with Liz, and my immediate response was "Oooooooh". I've been seeing these double wire swirls around the Internet more and more frequently but hadn't attempted any of my own. Time to break out the one-pound rolls of copper wire I bought just before Christmas at Robert Hall Originals in St. George.

In the midst of all my oooohing, I kind of glossed over Pearl's warning about this project not being for beginners. I also didn't really read the part of the title underneath the video on YouTube where it says "Experienced". The result became more Oopsies than Ooooh.

Last night, I queued up the video and watched again as far as the materials list (I'd previously watched the entire video through once). I dug out some very chunky citrine beads I acquired who knows when or from whom, cut some wire and forged ahead doing what I thought I remembered. The first part went well but, yet again, where I screwed up was finishing off the pendants. I ended up with pointless clumps and lumps of twiddles going nowhere. Because the wire was hardening at an alarming rate by now, I also bent and goinked the wire and the whole pendant got really floppy.

With my first attempt, I also ended up with the back looking better than the front and therefore showing the bail (which in Liz's design is intended to be hidden). The second pendant went a little bit better in terms of initial swirls, but failed even more miserably as a functional pendant.

Here is Liz's picture of what the pendants are supposed to look like:

Here are my first two efforts. The fronts of my two pendants, where the top bits are working well... but then it kind of all falls apart, doesn't it!?!?

...and the backs. The swoopy swirls work on the one side of the back of the pendant on the left, but... again, they're on the back, and both wraps kinda fell apart on me anyway:

All I can say is, good thing I bought a pound of wire -- each of these pendants took about two feet of wire, the bottom halves of which are going to have to be tossed. I'm thinking I might be able to recoup the top bits, hammer the wire ends into curves and wire-weave them into something else.

By this time it was getting late. I still had all the citrines dumped on my bead mat anyway, some large matte black obsidian beads were in close proximity, so I threw this together in only a couple of minutes. This is one bracelet I really like:

So far so good this morning: there is no typing, and so it's back to the drawing board, but first I'll watch Liz's video a few more times.

Thanks for stopping by!

Minimal Skull Pendant Wrap & A New Beginning...

This skull cab pendant had no drilled hole and since my customer is male, he wouldn't like any scrolly, lacy trapping that I might otherwise have done -- and I rarely glue bails to anything. Once the copper darkens it will melt into the skull colours and be virtually invisible.

It doesn't show here, but once I was finished, I used my round-nosed pliers and goinked the back wires into zig-zags to tighten them up a bit.

Interestingly -- from a learning perspective -- this is the first time I've wrapped and trapped a pendant like this with dead soft copper wire. So MUCH much easier than using half-hard. Wowie zowie.

Then I started on my next project. I've been looking at this shape and the swirly storm cloud purple colours for a couple of days now. I have no idea what the stone is. It kinda sorta reminds me of lepidolite, but I got it off one of those budget strings of mixed pendants so it could be anything. A little free word association, along a desire also to do something incorporating tiny beads into the wire-woven edge and I ended up with this... 

Some notes: I started out with one idea, to have the pearls go all the way around, and gave up on that pretty quickly. I also didn't have the garnets with me that I was also thinking to incorporate. This will be another curvy freeform effort. 

I began by bending three wires at a 90 degree angle, nesting them and taping together what ended up becoming the plain woven edge you see in the photo. Note that the bend came before I changed my mind about the overall square wrap design. 

I cut off about 4 or 5 feet of 28 gauge wire and wrapped half of it on that plastic bobbin/mooshy spool thingy. THEY ARE FABULOUSLY USEFUL!!! You can buy them anywhere that sells kumihomo supplies. I got mine from Iguana Beads (King St., Cambridge, Ontario). Irene and Ken were next to me at the GRBS Show & Sale a few weeks ago. 

The "pearls" are Miyuki "Antique Ivory Pearl Ceylon" 6/0 round seed beads.

Stay tuned to see what it looks like finished... if I finish it. As I'm sitting here writing and looking again at the pictures, I'm getting different ideas... 

It took me two days...

This is the mess I've managed to create in just two days. I spent several hours yesterday sorting tax receipts into quarters, and then my pal Brenda arrived to learn some wire-wrapping techniques, so the receipt piles all got shoved to the back against the wall. Who knows how long they'll remain there as I just got a pile of typing in.

This is the pendant I wrapped with dead soft copper wire and which will be going on my market table tomorrow morning. No idea what the stone is. Reminds me of snowflake obsidian, but this doesn't have the opacity, and it's dyed. Most of the beads on the table in the above picture will end up wrapped. You can get some really cool examples of beads on multi-strings for next to nothing. I got mine from Arton in Toronto a year or two ago.

Thanks for looking!