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...