LadyGypsy.net – the blog of Kimberly Dowd of New Jersey

I have a lot of beading supplies these days. Enough to fill a plastic four drawer unit that sits next to my desk. But that’s not always practical when I’m working on one or two projects. I’m too lazy to put everything away and pull it all back out.

So what I’ve been doing is saving Tazo tea tins and using them to hold all of the beads, wire, and findings I need for each project.

The tins are even big enough to hold my wire cutters and pliers if I decide to take my projects with me. To keep them organized as I collect more tins, I just tape the name of the project on the outside.

Here is a sampling of my craftiness. It’s neat to see the evolution through the years. Now all I need to do is bring some to work with me and open the darn Etsy shop already!!!

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!