Balance and Weight

Have you ever had a piece of jewelry (or clothing) that just refused to sit on you the way you wanted? Did you fidget with it to set it straight, only to have it shift again and again? Sometimes things do this because they are improperly balanced. Balance is one distinguishing factor between a good piece of jewelry and a bad one.

This may sound snobbish, but I've made enough less-than-stellar bracelets to be convinced of the difference.

Imagine how a simple piece of yarn feels around your wrist. Say that you want the little knot facing up, sitting on the top of your arm. It probably stays there fairly well, with only some shifting.

Now, imagine putting a heavy glass bead on the yarn. Because of it's weight, it will always swing underneath your wrist. If you wanted it on top, then that's bad design, since the bead is not sitting where you want it.

But let's say you DO want it down there. Fine. But now the yarn is kind of tight around the top part of your wrist, and it is uncomfortable. That's bad design. A piece of jewelry should both look and feel just right.

While I'd love to pretend to always make perfect jewelry, I just don't.

Most of my first bracelets did not have heavy things attached to them, so all this balance stuff was not a problem. My first piece to be heavily accoutered was this one:

It feels great on my wrist. While the bead cluster does tend to fall to the underside of my wrist, it happens slowly, and the VK portion is stiff enough that it keeps the distribution of weight spread out. Yay for me!

On the bracelet below, however, the pearl cluster drags itself down on the wearer's wrist.

An otherwise attractive piece, it is not balanced well.

So here is another lesson on my way to actually making perfect jewelry. Or so I hope.

Re-purposing Looks Good On You

When I first started making VK, I naturally wove only simple chains. But within a month or two, I could tell I would get bored without other elements to add.

On my second trip to the hobby shop where I usually got my supplies, I bought a small bag of wooden beads. They were fun for a while, but it was a bit monotonous with only those. I wanted more things to play around with, but I did not have a lot of money to spend buying new supplies all the time.

The answer to fixing boredom on the cheap? Used jewelry!





This piece is made from a pair of earrings that I found at a garage sale.

For a while, the earrings sat in my box, lonely, and without purpose. Poor things. But I just didn't know what to do with them! I just hoped that someday they might be useful.

Their time to shine came after I'd woven a double-knit chain of red and gold. It was an experimental color combo, and indeed I didn't know how I was going to finish it off.

I think you can see what happened next. I disassembled and reassembled the earrings into a more bracelet-friendly shape, and attached one end to the chain and the other to a clasp. The earrings even had some gold-colored leaves that I artfully positioned at my whim.









The advantages of using re-purposed jewelry don't stop at their low cost. Not only does it introduce me to other peoples' jewelry design, which stretches my concept of what is possible for me to do, but using old jewelry means that my piece is absolutely unique to any other I might try to make. I will never find earrings like that ever again.

Read my next blog to see how his beautiful experiment taught me something that I'd never thought of before.