Working with Wire

This week, I tried to add some aesthetic value to the wire that I used to attach the beads to the fish hooks. Instead of simply wrapping the wire around once or twice to make it secure, I tried making a design with the excess wire to add to the look of the earrings. For my first try, I think it went really well. I wrapped the wire into a spiral pattern and then looped it around itself at the bottom to keep it secure.

One of the difficult things of this technique was that since you need two earrings to make a pair, I had to make the wire decoration the same on both earrings. It was sort of hard to make the designs look like each other, but after a bit of messing around with it I learned how to manipulate it enough to get it to do what I wanted it to do. I think the finished products turned out really well:





















I have really enjoyed making earrings so far. As mentioned in Gelber's Crafts, Tools and Gender article, crafts give people something to do in their spare time to help them feel productive. Even though I may still be sitting around in my room, I still feel like I'm accomplishing something rather than wasting time watching tv or being on facebook. This way, I come out with a finished product that I can be proud of instead feeling as if I've wasted my day. I feel that this is a common reason and motivation for people who spend their spare time making crafts. It's not considered actual work so they can still enjoy what they're doing and relax, while at the same time avoid feeling idle.

Next week, I want to take the level of individualism and uniqueness of these earrings to the next level. In order to do that, I'm going to use the beads as a canvas for my own art work rather than have the beads be the center of the art themselves. I'm excited to expand my horizons as an artist and try something new.

Trying different techniques

Last week, I made earrings by sliding the beads onto head pins and then bending the excess wire of the pin through the fish hook two times to make sure it would stay. For this week I decided to try a different way of connecting the beads to the hooks.I went out to a craft store and bought a package of jump rings. Jump rings are the little circular wires that can be bent open. I also got a pair of earring pendants with a small hole at the top for the jump rings to be connected to.

When I got back to my dorm I got out my set of pliers and my new purchases and went to work. I was expecting it to be fairly easy. All it requires is bending the jump rings open, sliding them through the hole in the pendant and the hole at the base of the fish hook & there you go, you're done. It wasn't quite that easy. First of all, the jump rings weren't big enough to fit through both the pendant and the fish hook at once, so I had to use 2 jump rings to make them fit. Second of all, since the jump rings are so small, it's hard to hold them and bend them open and closed with the pliers, especially while trying to keep the fish hook inside the ring & out of the way. Fortunately the jump rings didn't present too big of a challenge, but it was slightly more difficult then I'd anticipated. In the end, I was able to turn two orange shell pendants into a new pair of earrings:












After being a bit annoyed with the jump ring technique, I decided to take a break from it and make another pair with the head pins. While at the store earlier I'd also bought a few green stone beads that had caught my eye. The down side to making earrings is that you're limited in the materials you can choose because you don't want the earrings to be too heavy. There were several other interesting stone beads I would have liked to have picked but I figured they'd hurt my ears to wear, which defeats the purpose. But luckily, these stone earrings were just the right weight. After learning the head pin technique last week, I was able to finish these earrings relatively quickly:











For next week, I plan on experimenting a bit with the head pin technique and maybe incorporate the wire as part of the design instead of just a way to connect the pieces together. I'm looking forward to working on my wire bending skills and adding another interesting visual aspect to the earrings I make.

And so it begins...

While I was contemplating what to make for my by-hand project, I wanted it to be something that I could use. Up until now, the majority of things I've made have only been things that I can set somewhere and look at. This time around, I wanted to branch out and make something that had both an aesthetic value and a use. So I decided upon making earrings. I love collecting earrings, especially unique, hand-made ones. My favorites earrings are the ones that I've purchased from street vendors in Toronto and from global gift shops. This project gives me the chance to make my own unique creations and display them in my everyday dress.

I had researched jewelry making online and found out what tools I would need in order to make the kind of earrings I wanted. So tonight, I went to Hobby Lobby and picked up what I needed to get started. That included:

- A set of different pliers and wire cutters











-Fish hook earrings and head pins










-An assortment of beads











After trying out a few different bead arrangements and struggling to figure out how to securely connect the head pin to the fish hook, I finally succeeded in making my first pair of earrings =).












Now that I've figured out the basic method behind making dangling earrings, my next step is to continue to find beads that catch my eye and incorporate them into new designs for other earrings. I'm excited to see where this project takes me and can't wait to have even more pairs of unique, hand-made earrings =).