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!

Wire-weaving...

Picked up Sarah Thompson's book last night from my mailbox. It was shipped from Amazon.ca Tuesday morning and got here in the day's mail south of the middle of nowhere Thursday afternoon. Not bad!

I'm severely dyslexic when it comes to understanding written directions and even photographs, in particular when it involves continuous sequential movements like the various wire weaves (or oil painting, say. From a practical standpoint, I still don't know what an underpainting is and how one uses it to get to a finished painting. It's a completely baffling mystery to me.) Given that, I became happier and happier that I subscribed to her video at Craftsy, and watched it straight through first to get an overview, because I would've become very frustrated if I only had the book -- again, that's just me. The biggest difference between her video and the multitude of others on YouTube is that most of them that I've seen assume you already know the basics (but you don't know that when you start watching them), and Sarah anticipates every question as it occurs to you as a first-time viewer.

Now I'm working my way through the video again -- slowly -- from the beginning. Well, this first weave at any rate. Yikes.

I'm using 18 gauge for the base wires (three) and 28 gauge to do the wrapping. For what it's worth, about 2 feet of wrapping wire does maybe an inch of this modified soumak weave I'm starting with.

Not the most exciting picture in the world, but... it's a start, and shows just under an inch of weave.

One of the things Sarah advises in the video to use are kumihomo bobbins to wrap the longer lengths of wire. Not having bobbins, I tried wrapping wire around a pill bottle and taping it with painter's tape, but it quickly fell apart. The pill bottles are actually kind of heavy. Then the wire got too kinked so I had to cut it. I think it will work for now, but need to use more tape. Don't cheap out: it's not expensive.

Now I'm wrapping with about four feet of wire in total. I'd started in the middle, but with only four feet of wire I wouldn't really need to do. She gives very clear instructions on how to seamlessly incorporate new wrapping wires into the weave.

I have no idea what I'm actually going to do with this other than wrap a pendant, but I want to add some hammered twiddled paddles at the ends, so I did cut the base wires extra-long and will use this as a play piece.

Thanks again to Pearl at Beading Gem for turning me (and a lot of other people) onto Sarah's video and book.

Thanks for looking!