Wire-Decorated Pumpkins for Fall

A couple of pumpkins I've decorated with craft wire for autumn:

Pumpkin decorated with spirals made from 18g copper, silver, and gold craft wire, by Sweet Freedom Designs

Small decorative pumpkin wrapped with 18g orange, chartreuse, and dark green Artistic Wire, by Sweet Freedom Designs

Before I go any further, these are NOT my ideas - I bought the book where I found these ideas at least 7 years before I discovered beading. I saw it in a bookstore, bought it, and put it on my craft bookshelf at home, and never touched it again. (Sound familiar?) Then, 2 days ago, I still was looking for book I have been trying to find for about 3 weeks, and decided I might as well look on the craft shelf, and though I didn't find what I was looking for, I did discover this black book with "Halloween" written on the spine in white in a really cool font. I pulled out the book, and the spiral-decorated pumpkin was on the cover, and I knew I wanted to make it! If you like Halloween crafts, you might want to check out halloween, 101 frightfully fun ideas. The book has a wide spectrum of Halloween crafts inside!

So, back to my wire-embellished pumpkins.

Another view of pie pumpkin covered in craft wire spirals, by Sweet Freedom Designs

This started as a pie pumpkin, about 10 inches high and 10 inches in diameter. The book recommends using silver solder to create the spirals, but that's crazy talk! I don't know where they get their silver solder, but around here, it's expensive!

I decided 18g craft wire was a better idea, and even better? I could combine gold, silver, and copper to decorate my pumpkin! Y'all know how I love to mix metals.....

I started out small, and precise, and was hammering my spirals as I created them. And then my OCD and perfectionism kicked in - I got all worried about where the different spirals would go, and fussy about what colors were next to each other (I didn't want a whole cluster of silver, or copper, etc., sitting there - I wanted the colors arranged so there was never a spot with 2 of the same color next to each other! Yeah ..... that didn't happen. LOL.) And I wanted the spirals evenly spaced, and all sorts of other pickiness kicked in. So while I should have probably completed this one in an hour or so, it took me over 8 hours. Yeah, that's right: Eight Hours.

I was going to wrap some green artistic wire around the stem, and create some wire leaves, but after the 8+ hour of creating spirals, I. Was. Done.

Time for the other pumpkin!

Small decorative pumpkin wrapped with 18g Artistic Wire, by Sweet Freedom Designs

This cute little decorative pumpkin won my heart at the grocery store: its shape is perfect, and I loved it's freckled complexion! It's about 4 inches tall (not counting the stem) and about 6 inches in diameter.

The book called for "plastic coated wire" - I didn't have any of that, but I had 18g Artistic wire in bright orange, chartreuse, and dark green. The little pumpkin had an even number of grooves going around it, so I decided to alternate the orange and chartreuse wires for the wrapping on the sides. Then I added the dark green to the other 2 for the stem, twisting all 3 colors together and coiling them around the stem, then turning the ends into coiling tendrils.

The plastic-coated wire in the book shows up a lot better (could be because it is bright pink!), but it is also much thicker than my 18 gauge wire. If I were doing this one over again, I would probably bundle 3 pieces of each color together to wrap in each groove around the sides of the pumpkin. (Full disclosure: in person, the wires on the sides of the little pumpkin show up very well; they just don't look like much in the pics!) I also want my tendrils to be longer, so I will probably go back and wrap in a few more tendrils when I get back to work next week. I may even make a few wire leaves ... who knows?!

Happy Fall, y'all!

3 views of the pie pumpkin covered with craft wire spirals, by Sweet Freedom Designs

Green Swiss Cheese

And...now you know why I rarely name my pieces - I'm just not very gifted in the "clever name" department!

Here's how this pendant developed:

19g annealed steel from the hardware store 

I wrapped some annealed steel wire around my fingers to form a roughly oval shape, using the ends to secure the oval and created a bail for the pendant (the bail is at the top, but it is somewhat hidden in this pic):

annealed steel ready for firing

The torch has to be really hot, and because the piece is so large only a small segment of it gets hot enough for enameling, so the piece has to be immersed in small sections in order to get good enamel coverage. Multiple coats were applied - but don't ask how many! I lost count as I slowly rotated the piece round and round to get it covered.

after firing

Don't ask me what colors I used - sorry! I had 3 different colors on the table, and would dip into one, then switch to another, and now I have no idea what 3 I used - and this actually comes back to haunt me!

I really liked the shiny blue-green pendant, but the large open space in the middle was calling to me - can you hear it? "Fill me!" "Embellish me!" "Don't leave me naked like this!!"

So, after a week or so, in which I experimented with wire, wire and crystals, and other ideas to embellish the pendant, I hit on the idea of suspending something in the middle.

I cut a smaller oval from sheet copper, and then drilled it to achieve an open, perforated look:

perforated copper disc

And while this would have looked interesting on its own, suspended in the middle of the pendant, I decided to color it to go with the beautiful blue greens on the enameled oval.

Except that I couldn't remember what colors I had used. Arrrgh! So I had to spend some time experimenting with different colors to try to get something close - and I didn't hit the nail on the head, but I got close enough! (And then forgot to photograph the disc after it was enameled - sorry!)

Then it was time to attach it to the pendant, and this called for more experimentation. I got really lucky here, in that I had some 26 gauge artistic wire that was almost a perfect match for the pendant (and since I only had 6 colors of 26g artistic wire in my stash, you can see what I mean by lucky). But I wasted a BUNCH of wire trying to get an attachment method that suited me!

And here is the result again:

I absolutely love this piece! But now Barbara Lewis has challenged me to try to make it all in one fell swoop - shape the annealed steel into the form, attach the perforated copper with copper or steel wire, and then enamel it all as an assembled piece! I'm saving that challenge for a long, rainy day!

So here is a challenge for you - please, please give me a better name for this piece - then I can list it on Etsy with a clever moniker!

Peridot Byzantine Earrings

I wove these chainmaille earrings using the Byzantine weave, with a mixture of sterling silver rings and rings I made from this gorgeous peridot artistic silver wire - I just love this color!

Woven Wire Bracelet

This is a bangle bracelet I wove with 2 colors of 18g artistic wire - this wire is dead soft, so it is very easy to weave with. And I love the brown and the blue together!

This is the hook and eye closure:

Fun bracelet! And it's available in my Etsy shop!

Snowflake Obsidian Earrings

I made these to go with my chainmaille lariat from earlier this week:

If you look closely, you'll notice black earwires. I love to make earwires from 22g artistic wire, with its full assortment of bright colors, and then match my earwires to the earring. I confess, I'm matchy-matchy, and I don't care who knows, or what anyone says! 

Worth every minute!

Sunday was Metal Studio Day again, something a small group of us try to do once a month. Often we go in 12 different directions, and just do our own thing, but this time we decided to tackle one project together.

The project on the cover of the Oct-Nov 2011 issue of Step by Step Wire Jewelry had been calling out to us ever since we received the issue in the shop last month. The colors are "my colors" - seems like I am always returning to blue and green when I make jewelry, and green and blue look so fabulous with copper!

This necklace was a mix of cold connections and wire work, and we knew it would take a large chunk of time to create, so we gathered at 9:30 Sunday morning, and started to create.

I have to say that this project was unusually poorly written for a Step by Step Wire project; I can't recall ever seeing such vague instructions in a Step-by-Step project. To begin with, rather than telling you how much wire to use for the base piece, the instructions call for working directly off the wire spool, and coiling until "you have the right size". Yet the "right size" is never specified, and when a group of people are trying to create a project where they are sharing one spool of wire, they can't all "work off the spool" - an approximate length, and a template, would have been very helpful. So we spent quite some time on this step, futzing around, and wasting a lot of wire.

The size of this coiled wire base - its width, the height of its coils, and the number of coils - is critical to all the rest of the steps in the project, and determines the number and size of the beads and domed copper cups that will fill in the design. Without any clear measurements provided by the project, we sort of worked in the dark, cutting and doming our copper cups ("Make as many as you like.") while the base coil tumbled, not knowing really how many or what sizes we needed. But we made several different sized domed cups, and then had fun rummaging through the shop looking for green, blue, and brown beads to add to our project.

I decided to patina some of my copper cups using a method described in my brand new copy of Jewelry Lab.

This is an exciting book for metal workers - loaded with tips, tricks, and project ideas. I am particularly excited about the patina section right now, and after my success with the colored pencil & gesso technique, I can't wait to try more ideas from this book.

These are my colored-pencil patinated discs - I really like how they turned out, and it was so easy!

Assembling the necklace was tricky, as we discovered that getting the beads and copper cups to wrap tightly was not going to work as described in Step 6. We each attached 4 or 5 units according to these instructions, and they slid and wobbled on the base, so we figured out how to use some 24g wire to stabilize their attachments, and then we modified the attachment instructions for the rest of the units, to get a nice tight wrap onto the coil.


We finished the project, attaching the copper chain and S-hook as the last step, at 7:30 PM. So from start to finish, 10 hours. And worth every minute. Though some measurements and a template for the base coil would have saved us over an hour - but, to use my very least favorite colloquialism, it is what it is.

I am absolutely thrilled with my finished necklace, and now that I have completed the project and worked out the kinks, I am ready to make another one!


Edited 10/24/11 to add: In respect to the Step-by-Step Wire project instructions: A customer came into my bead shop on 10/22/11 and perused this particular article after noticing the project picture on the front of the issue. After about 4 minutes, she commented on how badly written the instructions were, and asked how she was supposed to know how much wire to purchase in order to make the project? Good point - I had only looked at it from the aspect of making it as a group; as a bead shop owner, I had not even considered the difficulty a customer would encounter if trying to purchase supplies for this project.

Jen's Pind Linkage (JPL)

JPL (Jen's Pind Linkage) is one of my favorite chainmaille weaves. It yields such a nice, tight, spiral weave, and in my opinion works well whether done in one color, multiple colors, round rings, square (wire) rings, and more.

In this photo, you can see 3 very different JPLs I have done:

The top chain was made with 16g gold-filled (round) rings, the middle one with 18g bronze rings cut from square wire, and the bottom one is a tricolor chain in 20g rings (copper, gold-filled, and sterling),

This is another photo of the 20g tricolor JPL:



I enjoy working with color so much that I made another 20g tricolor JPL to compliment the chain-bezelled raku cabochon now available in my Etsy shop.

I chose turquoise, blue, and burgundy rings for this chain; they pull out the gorgeous colors in the raku cab.

Here's a guided tour of the creation of the 18g bronze square JPL:

Getting started: big pile of rings, and a clasp.

The weave is established, and now I just have to keep it going until I reach the finished length:

Halfway done!

Finished:

Detail of finished weave:

I believe this square version of the JPL would make a great bracelet for a man - particularly if stepped up to 16g square rings.