Playing With Wire

 

My daughter and I are fascinated with wire.  We’ve been playing with it for weeks, finding out what it can do and what we cannot force it to do.  This week, in addition to our experiments, we made three projects.  I don’t have pictures of my daughter’s projects, but here are mine.

First, we made a butterfly out of wire. It was pretty easy, just some spirals wired together.  We used Beadsmith silver craft wire, 18 gauge, wrapped with 24 gauge.

Then we made simple rings with some beads.  I used 3mm Swarovski crystals in turquoise with 21 gauge copper wire.  The lesson we used is called 3-Bead Hammered Ring, but I used 5 beads in mine.  This was the first time that I hammered a ring to make it harder, and we were both surprised at how much harder the metal got!

Then, we made a ring called The Wave.  This one gave me some difficulty.  The instructions were great, but I think it’s a little above my level right now.  My ring definitely doesn’t look like the one in the tutorial, lol.  But I’m wearing it, so it’s not that bad.  I managed to make it the right size, and to smooth out all the ends inside so that it isn’t scratchy on my finger.  I used Beadsmith square craft wire, 21 gauge, in silver and antique bronze.

Now I’m going to try making a beaded rosette.  My boyfriend’s sister wants an ohm symbol, and she wants it to be round.  I found a really nice picture of one, and I have the Easy Bead Pattern software, so I put it in there.  It’s a free program, check it out. 

First I tried peyote stitch, but none of the shapes in the picture were coming out correctly, so I switched over to rosette stitch.  It looks great, but I’ve never done this stitch before.  It’s kind of like bead embroidery, done in circles.  I’ll give it a try and see what happens.  It looks like I’m going to have to use a million beads, though.

What do you have on your beading table?

Cat