Tree Weaver - Wire Weaving

Hi again! Been working on pieces from Lisa Barth's book Timeless Wire Weaving lately. Love her work and so glad to learn how to do it! I was using wire that was a little too thick and they were coming out rather large...but it's okay, since I come from a family of giants. :) I am 5'8" but my one aunt is 6'4" and another is 6'9"!

The book calls for small square diagonally drilled turquoise beads...no luck on those! So I adapted...:)

 Side view of the bracelet above. This wire is 18g and probably 14g. The cool thing is the turquoise pieces spin! Great for fiddly people like me. :D

 The bracelet above was the same pattern but made with 20g wires. And additional turquoise! Spin, spin spin!

You can see the difference between the two above, just because of the wire size. I haven't decided whether to put a patina on these or not, I like them so much like they are!

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The one above is also from Lisa's book, but I put one of my polymer clay mokume gane pendants in it. I wish I could take a good picture of these stones! That red color is actually a brilliant pinky/purple. :) With lots of sparkle! I love the color with the copper wire though...

This one is a dyed crackled agate with copper wire. It comes this color, I did not put a patina on it and it won't change or come off...My own design. 

Side of the dyed agate pendant. Just wanted to show that weave....I just love it, looks like knitting!

This is another bracelet from the book. I used a tiger eye donut I already had, just waiting for a design like this!

CSL Designs on Youtube has a tutorial for elven ears and I thought I'd give it a try. 

These are copper with Swarovski AB crystals. 

And then I got on a Tree of Life kick after I made one for one of my FB groups. I had seen one someone made with a crystal and decided to try a similar project. 

The one below is much smaller than the one above, which is more of a fan pull or window hanging than a pendant! The one below is nice, though, I wore it the other night and it doesn't scratch or anything. Kind of important when you have so many wire ends!

And finally, this is the one I entered in the FB contest on my group. Love how it came out although the swing is a little too delicate to wear this! Again, much larger than you would probably want to wear for a pendant, though that is just MY taste!

Thanks for looking and come back soon! Please give my  FB page a like!

Stained Glass And Copper Wire Wrapped Pendants

Greetings! I've been playing around with the rotary tool and stained glass (see my previous posts) and decided to try to wire wrap the glass this time. What do you think? Front and back of the palm tree. I like the natural white streak "mountain" hidden in the glass on the middle right side. Reminds me of Hawaii!

Don't ask me why I zig zagged the back. Would have been better if I wrapped it like my next one...the same front and back. Oh well, I still like it!

This one came out a little better. Having the wrap the same front and back gave it a little more stability and of course, symmetry. :) The glass is hard to photograph but it's iridescent, rather purply and pinky. This is the same glass I used in the windchimes I showed here last week. It photographs much better outdoors!

And it's transparent. :) It would actually be a nice Christmas ornament or window decoration. As you can see, I wrapped the back to match the front wires. It almost looks like a reflection in the phototgraph! :D

As always, thanks for looking and come visit again! You never know what I'll be up to next....

Stained Glass Windchimes

Another one of the recent Facebook groups I joined was a stained glass group. I've made a few things in stained glass but I never felt that my soldering was sturdy enough. I saw someone post a project on the group that didn't require any soldering, though, and decided to make my own version!

I got some thick copper wire at Home Depot in the electrical department. I am not sure how long the spool of it was but I have enough to make about four of these, for around $15. I have a stash of stained glass due to lucking into someone selling a huge bin of it at a yard sale once....got the glass and some tools for $25! I used iridescent and clear. 

I have a set of glass drills from Harbor Freight (best place to buy tools and some supplies cheaply!) but didn't want to bother with using them, so I decided to use my grinder's wheel to grind rounded indentations so I could use that to attach them to the wire instead. Much faster! I used this rubbery clear/white hollow tubing I bought for jewelry at Hobby Lobby - it comes in black and white together in the package, but I have never had a use for the white until now! I think they use it for pony beads. 

So I had a lot of that on hand and decided to reinforce it with some fishing line inside it. I cut small pieces of the tubing, ran some fishing line through it, wrapped it around the indentations in the glass and then secured it with some 20 ga copper wire I had from jewelry making. Then I added some beads, and more tubing, and attached it to the wire with some more wire wrapping. The pictures might make that clearer!

I have a large stash of beads...a lot of these were from a package I got from a friend who had purchased them at a yard sale. I am not sure about whether this should be used outdoors, although all of the materials are rather weatherproof I will have to decide whether or not to seal the copper so it doesn't tarnish. Below is a closeup so you can see the variety of beads I used and how I secured the pieces to the wire. I wrapped a package of 20ga around the thick wire and left spaces where I could run the individual danglies I made. It is a pretty simple project, just requiring a glass cutter and the supplies I mentioned. I didn't cut straight lines, it is mostly freeform. I just ground the sharper edges off and left it rather - whimsical, shall we say! You COULD wrap the edges but then the glass wouldn't "chime". It doesn't really make a sound like windchimes are supposed to, though, anyway! More of a tinkle. :D You can vary how it hangs, by making the spiral wider...which would shorten it up some. Or make the circumference smaller and then it would hang lower. I have to take it outside and get some pictures with the sunlight hitting it! 

Update! Here's one in the sun. :) I just love this glass! <3

As always, thanks for looking! Make sure to stop by my Pinterest page and like my Facebook page! 

Bezels and Stringart

In my post yesterday, I touched on the subject of making bezels out of flat aluminum wire for polymer clay pendants. Pictured below are a few I have planned for the next time I want to make a polymer clay item...I'll use them to cut the clay out and it should fit tightly. Pictured with them is one of my fauxpals encased in a bezel. If I had planned it, I would have punched holes in the bezel and poked matching holes in the clay before baking. This one I just glued in. Using the wire in this manner makes a nice, professional, polished edge for the pendants. (UPDATE: I must have subliminally copied these ideas for my bezels below! Hers are SO much nicer though!)

The sun below shows how I used it to cover the edges of my back to back polymer clay faces. I retrofitted it, meaning the pendant was done but the edges were ugly, so I had to cut pieces of wire and punch holes so it would fit tightly around the wires holding the wire sunrays on the baked clay. I'm happy with the result. It's not noticeable that the black bezel is two pieces!

Now to get to the point of this post. :) I also tried the bezel technique around a previously made faux ivory/bone pendant that I wasn't crazy about the sides of, seen below. It really punched up the appearance of it. Gave it a nice finished edge. Then I tried something a little different..I used my metal punch to punch holes as evenly as possible along the edge of the bezel wire before bending it around the pendant (polymer clay with Lisa Pavelka foils on it, love that stuff!). I did not bother to glue the bezel to the clay this time because....

...I decided to wire wrap it instead. Sort of the old technique we learned in school where you used string and nails to make a picture...this time used to hold the pendant in place. It also held the bezel onto the pendant. As you can see in the photo above, the punch left jaggedy holes along the edge (I wasn't as careful as I could have been because I was experimenting!) and although I used a file on the edges, I was a little leery it would scratch or catch. But once the wire wrapping went on, it filled all the holes and covered the sharper edges, so it worked out nicely! The holes keep the wire from slipping. Next time I'll be more precise about hole placement!

Below is a different type of string art pendant I was making a couple of years ago. It is a pink fauxpal and I wrapped it by encircling it with a coil of wire and wrapping in between the coils. It takes a little practice but is a neat way to finish a pendant. Especially when you can find pretty pink wire to match your clay. :)

Hope you enjoyed this post and got some ideas from it for your own designs. Thanks for looking! Make sure to stop by my Pinterest page and like my Facebook page!  Later!

2014 Christmas Cards and Beaded Ornament Covers

It's been a while since I posted, thanks to Christmas and other household projects. But I've been making new things all along! I guess I'll start with Christmas!

I had never made any beaded ornaments before, but this year I was determined to make one! I had no pattern, I just saw a few on the internet that I liked the components of and combined them to make a couple that I liked. Love the little snowflake, they are very quick to make! Here is the link to the pattern, which is from a Russian site. The panels I made by looking at one similar and guessing it was brick stitch. :) The one on the right does not have wings! The wings belong to a wire fairy I made - behind it...for another post. :)

Then in the middle of my beading, I had to make my yearly Christmas cards! They weren't as involved as in other years but still took a bit to design. What do you think of the outsides? I have some wonderful embossing folders and had a lot of fun with them this year. The ones that looked like a reindeer sweater were my favorite. Middle right is one of them. Click the picture to enlarge! The metallic paper was cool...looked like metal when I was done embossing. Doesn't photograph too well though!

Here is a closeup of one card. I made the green patterned envelope to match the size of the card from some crappy Christmas scrapbook paper. I have stamped/embossed papers that are just a little ugly with some pretty glittery embossing powders before, but I decided to hold back this time! :) I cut the mats and used an embossing folder for the embossing on the white paper but cheated with the little ready made glittery chalkboard chipboard figure on the lower right. 

Here is the inside of the card! They all had a fireplace inside. Saw it on Pinterest where someone used a crimper to make the border of the fireplace look like paneled wood. Came out cute! (There are other examples of fireplaces like this on my Christmas Pinterest page!) Used another embossing folder to try to make the background by the fireplace look like wallpaper. Stamped the Merry Christmas over the fireplace. I used some kid's holographic large chunk glitter for the fire, and it sparkled nicely! I used a punch for the "doily" and cheated with stocking stickers - they were cuter than anything I could have made! I did break down and buy a die cut for the fireplace grate. I love 40% off coupons! I also used snowflake peel-off stickers from Hobby Lobby to decorate the card and some had this type of wreath - which is also a sticker - and some had a different type. I didn't use my Cricut to make this card, it was pretty easy to do the math since they were all the same. I just used a ruler and a blade to make the few cuts there were. 

Snowflakes were the theme for most of the cards. I used an embossing folder and some very old Christmas paper I'd been holding on to for a long time. Wasn't sure about using pink glittery snowflakes but I think the card worked, don't you? :) The "Season's Greetings" on the bottom right were a stamp/diecut set I had.

Another inside. This was the other type of wreath I ended up using. No doily on this one. 

 I liked this set of earrings, I made several. They feel Christmassy to me!

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Now, on to more recent stuff. I've been playing around with my polymer clay again. I love making the bone/ivory canes! They look so beautiful when they're done right. And I've fallen in love with this one particular mold, which I like making into sun faces. You can see below the difference when the finished clay has not been antiqued! It really brings out their features. 

This is a recent sun I made, using one of the molded faces above. I love playing around with the faces after I mold them, before baking. On this one I only made it one sided but sometimes I sandwich wire between two of them so I can make two sided pieces out of them. 

I had a problem with the edges of some of the clay beads I had used the Lisa Pavelka Magic Glos on, and also when I had two suns that I wanted to meld back to back after baking (below). So I recently tried using this flat wire I found at Hobby Lobby (I've seen it at Michael's, too) as a bezel wire, as you can see in the photo. I glued a black one around my fauxpal in the photo below. I guess I could have done a better job with the seam! In the future I am going to bake them right in the bezel...this was my first experiment! I will also be able to drill holes to hang them by. I am going to use the others I made to cut out and bake the next clay pendants I make in so they'll fit perfectly. Has anyone else tried this? 

This sun is a good example of my bezel idea. I had two of the suns, which I glued together, but the sides showed, so I made a bezel that encased them both. So this little guy is two sided. :)

In the photo below, you can see the black bezel I made a little better. This is the other side of the one above.

While I was looking for my sun mold, I found a couple of other molds I had bought that were supposed to be for fairy and female forms. I wasn't fond of the fairy face but I loved the female one. Once again, it's fun playing with their features, although these are so tiny you'd need a magnifying glass and very steady hands! I had recently joined this cool Facebook group for polymer clay and saw someone using these intricate metal filagree plates to back a pendant and thought I'd try it with these flower filagrees. Love the butterfly one! They have a rather weird cast on some of them because I used pearl clay and it left a pattern on their faces, but I think it makes them look aged! Rather haunting, aren't they? Not sure if they should be pendants or pins...

Here is the butterfly one before antiquing. Big difference, huh! What a beautiful mold!

Another thing I played with was a contest I found, also on Facebook, on a DIFFERENT polymer clay group! I am so excited because Lisa Pavelka is actually a MEMBER and I think she's so talented! She has a different little contest every month - I just joined so they were doing a Valentine's Day Carmex jar challenge. I made the little doohickey below as a decoration for the jar but didn't use it. I made it from a clear rubber stamp! Once again, antiquing made a huge difference! Isn't it cute? It's only.about 1.5" square.

And finally, to end this long post! I made some of my sun faces into ladies. What do you think? Maybe a redhead? Brunette? Lol.

For some reason, this reminds me of the Les Miserables girl. :)

That's it for now! Look for me on Facebook. Karmic Confetti, or my Pinterest page! There is so much more there that I haven't uploaded here yet. Soon! Later!