Stupid Beading Tricks: Wire Wrapped Pendant

Posted April 19th, 2009 by Kimberly Dowd

Even though I don’t blog about it all the time, I’m still messing around making jewelry. My creations have gone from strands of nothing but beads to wire links and beads and now it looks like I’m enamored with mostly wire.

I always wanted to make a wire wrapped pendant but never could figure it out. So tonight I grabbed a center-drilled stone that I got from Michaels, some 26g copper wire and started wrapping.

It wasn’t going well – the wire wasn’t tight around the facets of the stone. Frustrated, I noticed that a lot of the pendants had little bends in the wire. So I took my pliers and bent a strand. I could feel the wire tighten against the bead.

Eureka!

Eight thousand bends later, look!

Wrapped!

The twists are a little rough and the bail is flimsy due to the thinness of the wire, but wow. It’s 1.5″ from bail (bale? I’ve seen it both ways online) to bottom. I may twist up a simple S-link copper necklace for it, or I might just string it on a brown ribbon I have.

Edited to add:
The completed piece:

Finis!

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