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.