Wire-Woven Crab Agate Pendant...

"Crab" is another wire-weaving meditation done this morning at the market in between customers where I varied the weave from the first one I tried with the Cobra pendant (the modified soumak): instead of wrapping once, I wrapped twice, and developed a kind of organic zig-zag with gaps, to which I added lengths of wire which I first curled and hammered. In the interest of trying to stop being so freaking precise, I did all this adding and subtracting of wires randomly.

When I went to choose a pendant out of a bag of miscellaneous assorted pendants, the light hitting the weave pattern kind of mirrored the crab agate pattern (I think this is crab agate; someone please correct me if I'm wrong), so crabs, water, waves, undulation, and the wrap pretty much took itself over from there.

The back view:

This is the first time I'm doing a lot of hammering of dead soft copper. It gooshes out a lot more than half hard, and I need to keep an eye on that to keep all the hammered bits a little more equal, as the ones that aren't hammered enough look it. I'm seeing this more clearly in the photographs: I'm not getting the curves quite as swoopy and curvy and loopy as I'd like, and I'm still cutting off wire ends waaaay too soon, but it's coming -- and it's So. Much. FUN!!!

The other bonus is this is a great technique to use up all those orphan beads off the mixed strings of budget beads that seem always to have three or four really cool pendants that pretty much sell themselves as is, but the rest of them are.... kinda... meh.

As always, see me at the market on Saturday mornings, or email me for the availability of "Crab" or other items.

Thanks for looking!