AEDM Week 3

Day 15: Copper and green Aventurine chainmail earrings. While browsing the Maille Artisans gallery, I came across this pattern of Byzantine weave zigzagging around beads, and I liked it. The one difficulty I had is that when I made the Byzantine units out of the same sized rings, they would slump unattractively when hanging. I fixed this by making smaller rings to put as the connectors, making the weave work better for this pattern.

Day 16: Copper and glass bead bracelet. More variations on Byzantine! As much as it's not my favorite weave plain, it is very versatile. Not much to say about this one.

Day 17: Gold chain and pearl necklace. Well, I did it. I finally broke down and bought more jewelry making supplies this day. I splurged and bought some gold-filled chain and wire, and this was the first thing I made with it. The necklace hangs slightly differently when worn, but that was the best I could arrange it in the lightbox.

Day 18: I made earrings to match the necklace, partially because I wanted to and partially to use up the leftover bits of chain that were created when I miscalculated for the necklace and had to shorten all of the segments in one strand by .25 inch. Regardless of the fact that I pretty much conjured this up from scraps, I'm really pleased with how they turned out.

Day 19: I was at an SCA event this day, so before the tournament started I whipped up these earrings from faceted beads (howlite?) and copper chain. I probably could have improved them a bit if I had spent more time fiddling with them, but jewelry making can't have priority every time, and I had fun fencing, playing games, feasting, and dancing with my friends.

Day 20: Silver link and pearl bracelet. This was another busy day and we were still up in Santa Barbara, but we had some time in the early afternoon and I persuaded Branden to come with me to the local craft store so I could pick up a few things. These were the items I found there that inspired me, so I made a bracelet out of them. That is, once I was done making cupcakes for a friend's child's first birthday party, which was fun too.

Day 21: Silver and brass two-tone chainmail bracelet. This one is a variation on helm chain that I have been wanting to try for a while. It was fun to play with different color combinations to see which one I liked best, and this one ended up being it. I think gold would've been a nicer color here than brass, but I already had the brass and can't really afford to buy more gold wire just yet.

AEDM Week 2

Day 8: Dangly earrings with silver chain and seed pearls. I'll be honest: I'm not entirely pleased with these. But you see, I ran into sort of a hitch: I ran out of chain. And silver headpins. So, given the limited resources I had to work on this one, I can't expect more. Still, if I'd had more chain and headpins, I would've liked them to be fuller. This does bring up a significant issue though: will this intrepid crafter have enough supplies to make it through the month? Only time will tell: stay tuned to find out.

Day 9: Silver wire wrapped ring with silver beads. Developed from a great tutorial that CraftyWillows posted on her blog, Little Bit Crafting. I wasn't very satisfied with my first attempt at this (pic below), but I'm much happier with this one. I originally wanted to use the seed pearls as the beads, but discovered that because of their tiny holes, they wouldn't fit on the 22 gauge wire.

Day 9 (Bonus): This was my first attempt at making a wire wrapped ring. It's not too bad, but there are some minor mistakes that I notice, which is why I made another one.

Day 9 (Bonus #2): Hummingbird mobile made of copper wire. I was inspired by hummingbirds because of two sources; the hummingbird brooch that Littlefinger from the series Game of Thrones often wears (it has nothing to do with his House's heraldry, but he adopted the hummingbird as his personal sigil), and True Thomas's wonderful Hummingbird Emporium. He has what he calls a "hummingbird habit": he has 4 hummingbird feeders set up on his porch and they are always busy with hummingbirds. When he sets up a small step stool in the middle of the porch, and you step up onto it, within a few minutes, you will have dozens of hummingbirds happily buzzing around at head-level. It's a really wonderful experience, both seeing them flitting about gorging on sugar-water and closing your eyes and hearing them buzz about. So, I wanted to make wire hummingbirds. I found a simple clip art silhouette of a hummingbird and just eyeballed it by bending the wire with pliers. Turns out, that's not such an easy thing. I made the biggest one first, then the medium one, and by then it was abundantly clear that I wasn't going to be able to make one small enough for any jewelry application. They were then abandoned until Branden got home and said he liked them and I should so something with them, so I made one more, the smallest one, to put them together in a hanging mobile. I then cut different lengths of copper chain to hang them from and ran into a problem: since the smaller one used less wire and was therefore not as heavy as the other side, it tilted quite steeply. After a bit of trial and error, I found two different antiqued copper beads that were different sizes and could balance out the weight on the two sides.

Day 10: Three-toned chainmail earrings. These are simple helm-chain links joined together to resemble flowers made of copper, brass, and silver. I liked them so much, I made a set to match in the ensuing days.

Day 11: Three-toned chainmail bracelet. In addition to the small circle of helm chain to match the earrings I made yesterday, I made the rest of the bracelet in a weave called JPL, short for Jens Pind Linkage, which to get a bit technical is just spiral 4 in 1 with a specific aspect ratio so that all of the rings are locked in place. This weave is considered notoriously difficult to learn, partly because you need such a specific aspect ratio or the weave will not work, and partly because care must be taken to ensure all of the rings on each side are "stacked" the same way. I found that using 3 colors of rings helped with the latter issue, as all I had to do was make sure that each color stayed stacked in a neat row. As for the aspect ratio issue, I didn't have any 20 gauge silver, so I used 22 gauge instead. Later I tried variations with just the 20 gauge copper and brass, and found that the chain was stiff and did not drape well. So while adding the 22 gauge silver did not make the chain loose enough to "unwind," it did improve the drape significantly. All in all, I'm very satisfied with how this turned out.

Day 11 (Bonus): I was having fun making the little helm units, so I made a little trinket out of them by wrapping two around a crystal pearl and stitching them together.

Day 12: Long shoulder duster chainmail earrings. These are made from a weave called shaggy loops, which is quite peculiar in that its pattern stays orderly while hanging but looks like an awful mess when laying flat. Because of this, it seems to me that earrings are the best application for this weave.

Day 13: Helm pendant. Since finishing the bracelet, I had been trying to figure out how I was going to manage to weave a whole necklace chain of JPL in just one day. The answer became that there was no way I was going to be able to do that, so I just cut a length of copper chain, made it into a necklace, and hung the pendant from that.

Day 14: Brass and Lapis chainmail bracelet. I was inspired by the iconic ancient Egyptian pairing of Lapis Lazuli and gold. Lacking gold, I made this beaded Byzantine-weave bracelet with brass instead. I like how it turned out, and I think that the surrounded bead in the middle is a nice variation to make it more interesting and appealing.

AEDM Week 1

Day 1: Okay, so I didn't really decide to do AEDM until day 2, so this one is kind of cheating. I basically just took a pair of feather earrings I had already made and added little moonstone and labradorite beads to them on day 2. They are very long, dangly, shoulder-duster type earrings. These were the only 2 feathers that looked like this in the package of pheasant feathers I got, and I rather like them, especially the iridescent green-tinged tips.

Day 2: I have had these beads for a while, and I think they are absolutely adorable. The only problem is that their holes are waaaay bigger than a headpin could hold, so I had to bend the wires into a spiral that could support the beads. Not my neatest work by any stretch, but I love mushrooms, and these beads were just too cute not to use.

Day 3: More feather earrings; these are guinea feathers with snowflake obsidian beads. These feathers caught my eye because they are uniquely shaped, and I like the way the grey and black marbled snowflake obsidian complements them.

Day 4: Chainmail earrings with garnet beads. The weave is Byzantine, both for the dangly part and for the surround of the garnets. Byzantine is still far from my favorite weave, but I find I like it better when it is not just a plain chain, but when it is arranged in more complex patterns like surrounding beads. Also, I love the combination of garnets and silver.

Day 4 (Bonus): I made a pendant to match the garnet and silver chainmail earrings, because: Why not?

Day 5: Necklace with seed pearls and peridot beads. I think it's very delicate looking, which I think is fitting especially for these tiny little pearls.

Day 6: This necklace with silver chain and peacock pearls was an experiment in trial and error, and one that I'm still not 100% satisfied with. Even so, I'm satisfied enough with it that I decided to leave it as it was rather than fiddling with it further. I knew I wanted a multi-strand necklace with different sizes of pearls interspersed throughout, and I knew I wanted the different strands to be at graduated lengths to create a multi-tiered effect. After making the 3 different strands with pearls on them, I wasn't happy with how the necklace looked, so I measured the difference between each of the strands and cut chains to go halfway between each strand. My measuring must've been wrong though, because when I put them onto the necklace, they seemed to closely follow the first and second strands rather than going evenly between the strands. At that point, I added the one final strand to follow the 3rd strand and decided to be done with it.

Day 7: These earrings actually go with a necklace I made a while ago. The necklace is a single strand of the gray pearls with faceted labradorite beads at regular intervals, with a similar-looking Japanese weave chainmail pendant with only 1 repetition instead of 2.