Matching Madness

This bracelet came about when I noticed that I had some beads that matched a an outfit that I planned on wearing for a wedding this summer.

First, here's a close-up of the copper chain (which, if I do say so myself, turned out great).

And here it is! I was so excited to make this bracelet -- just look at how well the greens and blues match! I only had 2 days to whip this one up, but it was worth the effort.

I can proudly say that this bracelet is well-balanced, which makes it feel nice on my wrist, and also just looks fabulous. I'm so glad for the spark of inspiration my outfit gave me!

Hoops and Loops

You know what makes things take forever? Procrastination and fear.

Making my circuit board necklace took the span of a many weeks. Weeks! It took me so long because there were two things that this piece was missing that I had trouble making, and was timid about trying. One was end caps for the VK chain. The other was a bail, a thing that would hook the pendant onto the necklace.

Thanks to the magic of the internet, I found two tutorials that helped me fill those gaps.

There's this one on the Katrina Lum Designs blog on end caps.
And this one on bails made with head pins,which is a small length of wire with a flat knob at the end to keep things from falling off.

As I was making my copper necklace for the circuit board pendant, I knew I wanted silver end caps to go with the silver in the bits of the circuit board, but I didn't really like the style of either of my purchased end caps. The end cap tutorial was awesome for the look I wanted, but after a failed attempt at making a pair, I was discouraged and it took me a while to get up the guts to try again.

You can see in this image below that it didn't come out perfect (there is a gap in the loops).

Then, when I saw that the circuit board pendant didn't come with a bail to attach it to my necklace, I thought "No bail? No problem."

But pride comes before the fall.

I thought maybe I could just put a silver ring through the hole, but the pendant is almost a centimeter thick. I tried to make my own bail with some 20 gauge wire that I ordered especially for the job, but I had no idea what I was doing, so nothing I made turned out very nice-looking. I was starting to get really irritated, so I gave up for a few weeks.

Then I finally got the bright idea to check out some online tutorials. (Why hadn't I tried that before??) I found one that was pretty easy, sticking a head pin through the hole, curving it up and around and making a little hook with itself behind the head. Presto!

After all that hemming and hawing, I eventually finished.

Maybe the time it took was part of the process. Maybe I needed time to recharge after each roadblock. I'm open to that idea. But I'm glad I wasn't stopped indefinitely. This necklace delights me so much! Thanks be to the infinite creative energy that keeps projects moving along -- even at a snail's pace!

Branching Out -- Nerd Style

As with many of my other stories, this one starts off with an object -- a piece of raw material from which inspiration grew.

Meet mother... board.

OK, it's not "mother board," per say, but a circuit board. It might not even be from a desktop computer, but you never know.

I saw this little number on clearance at my favorite hobby shop. Score! It's always exciting to try new stuff on the cheap.

Next, I took some time to think about what sort of chain it should be attached to.

I thought the copper wire would look pretty sharp with the green, but I wanted to use silver findings for the end caps and clasp to echo the silver-colored bits in the pendant.

You can see from the above picture that at first I had the hook clasp in the "middle" of two equal lengths of silver rings. I decided to change it so that the length could be adjusted by the wearer.

The result is a wonderfully, ostentatiously geeky necklace unlike anything I've yet made!

Read my next blog for some of the hoops I had to jump through to make useful hoops!! (The pendant didn't come with a way to attach it to a necklace! Ack!)

You Leather Believe It! (Flight of the Brain Bee)

Inspiration is notoriously capricious....

Over the summer, I was flipping through an Arhaus jewelry catalog (see the company's site here), and saw their "Swirls and Pearls" wrap bracelet, shown below.

This image entered my mind, and planted itself there like a flowering plant. A funny thing happened then -- a brain bee came and visited this flower, then went and cross pollinated with my Viking Knit plant. The seed thereby produced dropped into my cerebral soil and matured into what later became this bracelet.

Something about the leather really captivated me. I think that the idea of the hide being a base or anchor for the VK chain is not only an interesting experiment into different media, but the qualities of each material compliment each other and form into a whole that they couldn't have been all by themselves.

Thank you, mysterious brain bee!

Xtreme beads!

Many of my pieces have featured beads inside the weave. But this green bracelet takes it to a whole new level.

Here is the weave. You can't get away from the beads. They are EVERYWHERE.

There is a red bracelet that I tried putting a bunch of beads in just at the ends, as you can see below.

It didn't turn out as striking as I had hoped, however. But it helped me learn for the next bracelet.... I decided to take the leap and try something I'd been hoping to experiment with.

The subtle beads, numerous as they are, cast a nice effect over the whole length of an otherwise bland VK chain. It also beefed up the single knit weave so it is a tougher. I think I may use this design again....

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.