Make Your Own Wire Guards and French Wire

I wanted to show you all an easy way to make your own attractive beading wire protectors that you can do in any type of metal. This picture here is taken with 20 gauge wire as the base wire and 24 gauge wire as the wrapped wire. You can make several wraps of your smaller gauge wire around wire that is at least 20 gauge wire. Use the 20 gauge because you can get your beading wire through the coil when it's done. Use a flat nose pair of pliers to hold the wire in place and use your fingers or another pair of pliers to do the wrapping. I recommend using the second pliers to help you because then you can pull the wraps nice and tight and close. Make the wraps nice and close. Your finished work will look like a tight little spring when you are done. The coil wrapping should be at least 14 mm for your finished piece until you get used to working with it then adjust according to your preference. Trim the excess and slide off the thicker wire. Use just like you would french wire or Accu-Guards. Slide on to your beading wire followed by a crimp and secure the crimp behind the loop you made. See my Dragonfly necklace as an example.

Make a Pendant From a Briolette

Make a Pendant From a Briolette Experiment with Hammering for Different Effects

I made this pendant with a beautiful big deep ruby red faceted glass briolette but this is just an idea. You pick your own briolette and metals and beads to use. My briolette measures 25mm long and 18mm in diameter.

A bright 5mm dimpled brass bead accents this pendant and pretty filigree bead caps. The accent bead you use will need to have a hole large enough to accommodate 20 gauge wire doubled. The bead caps can't be so big that they stick out past the edges of the briolette. When you bend the wire up they need to lay flat and fit snug. Experiment.

To Create this lovely Deep Red Faceted Glass Briolette Pendant I used 20 gauge wire because this briolette is heavy. You decide what you need. I threaded the side drilled holes with the wire and took the ends of the wire and added vintage style filigree bead caps and made sure they laid flat against the briolette. I then brought the wire ends up through a 5mm dimpled shiny brass bead. The doubled brass wire was made into a sturdy double loop with about a 3mm opening. Tip - When you wrap a double loop try to keep the wires side by side when you make the loops and wraps. Stick the point of the round pliars through the loop to shape it and align the loops. If you carefully lay your wrapped loops on a metal block you can hammer the wraps and the loops to make a faceted look or just leave it plain. Be careful to not hit your accent bead. Twisted wire would look very nice, too.

The pendant hangs from a Hammered Brass 10mm Jump Ring. I took a link from a big 10mm round chain and hammered it to make my jump ring. Hammering really changes the look of jump rings and chain links. Make sure they keep their shape when you hammer them so the ends meet properly. You might have to bend and align.

Wire Wrap Your Jewelry Securely

Queen Ann's Lace

Queen Ann's Lace is a 20" necklace all hand wrapped with brass wire and each link pounded to give a nice shape.
Featured is a BIG Pink Chalcedony Quartz Drusy Pendant about 4cm x 3cm with a pretty lacy patina brass filigree. The back of the drusy pendant has very light faceting and is very pretty also.
The hand wrapped links include several 8mm Swarovski Crystals in Cantaloupe which is that neat one that changes colors in different lights ie. Sunlight, Neon, Halogen, incandescent from Peach, to Pink, Green, Blue and Clear.
The other beads are 6mm pink rose quartz, frosted green glass, and brass donuts. There are several brass filigree bead caps.
The clasp is a pounded brass swirl and loop.
All the brass is 100% brass it has patina that I buffed off in some places that will darken.
* Notice that the wire wrapping has several wraps on each link. When a piece of jewelry has this type of wrapping instead of just bending the wire closed; there is less risk of it coming open. This takes a lot of time, too. Even if a piece has one good wrap - most of mine has two or three - even one good wrap is very dependable and keeps a piece of jewelry from coming apart. Wire wrapping that has bends to fasten links or to close on stones or charms should be work hardened to make the bend more secure.

More examples of sturdy wire wrapping can be seen in these photo's on Jill's Blog. http://www.j-fiorejewelry.com/photos.html

Working With Gemstone Chips

When I took the string out of my peridot chips I thought OHHHH NOOOO! This is going to be a long night to try to string any of these to make any thing. So I got an idea. I laid them out on my bead board and turned on two lights. One was next to me and the other across the room to hold up the bead and see the hole! My bead board has inches marked of on it and I could separate everything into two rows for my double stringed Peridot and Citrine necklace. I pushed the peridot chips into the grooves of the bead board. That just made an organized mess! I found it was EASIER to work from the focal Citrine Bead out to the ends of the string. I Just picked up the big peridot chips first and took turns stringing them on the beading wire evenly on either side of the Citrine. I used a clip on the side I wasn't working on. I measured as I strung and only after they were on the string. I made sure they were tight when I measured. I believe this technique made this necklace look quiet nice.