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

Last week I was wearing one of my various sundry pieces of jewelry when a coworker called me over.

She was looking for a pair of short dangling blue-green earrings to match a top she had at home.

I could do that!

So I gave her my usual disclaimers:

1. I don’t work with precious metal
2. If they break I’ll fix it.

…and got to work. Finding the beads was easy – I have an embarrassingly large stash at this point and I knew I had the perfect color of Swarovski crystal.

They look bent here. I swear they're not.

I wanted to do something a little more that put a few beads on a headpin and call it a day. Earrings are easy when you string beads. Earrings get VERY difficult when you work with wire because then you have the whole “matching” factor to deal with.

So I started to play with the wire and eventually stumbled up on swirling the wire back up to the top of the earring and making a chunky wrap. It took 5 tries. Now I realize I should have pre-curled the wire (maybe around a pencil) before I strung the beads onto it. I’ll have to experiment.

Long story short, coworker was pleased. She asked how much she owed me. (!!) I didn’t take money…I had all the materials (believe you me) and it was a lot of fun getting back into the “string” of things. Bwah!

*****

Dreams:
1) I worked for Dilbert’s Pointy-haired boss. No comment.

2) I lived in California, a bit north of San Diego. I was very excited because I was only a short day trip away from California beaches

3) Funeral homes began “rating” viewings and funerals depending on the amount of dramatic outbursts that they predicted.

The lovely and talented Kristen had us for Easter Dinner back in April so I decided to make her a little hostess gift.

The brown beads appear to be painted shells. There are little moonstone beads in between them. I made the clasp myself with non-tarnish silver wire.

And I think LGB – LadyGypsy Beads – has a nice ring to it, yes?

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!