Wire Wrapping Jewelry

Wire Wrapping Jewelry

The Art of Wire Wrapping Jewelry

I’ve seen recurring trends throughout the last eight years that I’ve been hand crafting beaded and wire jewelry. One most prevalent design trend that I’ve noticed is the jewelry design technique of wire wrapping. Wire wrapping is a jewelry design technique commonly used in pendant necklaces, and a great example of the technique is the popular “Tree of Life” pendant with its wire strands wrapped to form a tree with several bead embellished branches. The basic purpose of wire wrapping enables cut cabochons, gemstone nuggets, cameos, coins, and beads to be used as pendants adding a focal embellishment to a chain or a strand of beads. The wire wrapping technique is also popular in creating other jewelry pieces such as bracelets and rings as well.

If you are contemplating a wire wrapping jewelry project and it’s your first attempt, don’t get discouraged if it doesn’t turn out as you envisioned at first, just keep trying and soon you will find that like many other things wire wrapping jewelry will get easier with practice and you’ll be an expert in a short amount of time. And if you’ve ever made wrapped loops for your dangle earrings or bead charms then you’ve taken the first step and you know that your wrap must fit snuggly around the frame and sit directly next to the previous wrap for the best looking wrap.

Many of today’s handmade wire jewelry designers are using almost every wire style available in their wire wrapping jewelry projects. Flat wire with stamped patterns add a dazzling uniqueness to a wrapped cabochon or crystal pendant and look especially nice as the center wire in the frame of the cabochon and as the primary frame wire around the crystal. Some wire wrapped jewelry artists utilize the same gauge wire throughout the entire design while others utilize a smaller gauge frame such as a 16, 18 or 20 gauge wire and higher gauge wrap like 22 or 24 gauge wire which adds a dimensional character to the piece but also allows the use of smaller bead embellishments.

When wrapping a cabochon stone, you’ll typically be using three wires as the base of the cab frame and one wire as the wrap wire tying the frame together. The two outer wires typically called the first and second primary frame wires for your wire wrapping project will be of round, twisted, or square shaped wire stock and should be of half hard tensile strength for sturdy support of your chosen pendant piece. The third or secondary center frame wire is where you can add a decorative stamped wire if you desire but remember that this wire should be the same thickness as the outer frame wires.

Common wire styles used as the wrap wire are round and half round wire stock and of a soft or dead soft tensile strength. Soft and dead soft wires are the easiest to manipulate in order to wrap snuggly around your pendant frame. As the wrap wires function is to tie the frame wires together these must be wrapped tightly around your frame. A good practice to get your-self into when creating a wire wrapped jewelry piece is to tighten the wrap every two or three turns. To do this you will need your flat or chain nose pliers, place the jaws of the pliers on the wrap wire parallel to the flat surface of the frame, clamp down slightly and give the wires a twist in the same direction of your wrap. If you’re wrapping a single frame wire that is round I find it easier to tighten my wrap using my crimping pliers but again if I’m using square wire I’ll use my flat nose pliers to tighten the wrap around my frame wire.

I recently designed and created a pair of 22 gauge sterling and copper drop ear wires embellished with facet cut Citrine rondeles and Peridot heishe natural gemstones. I used 22gauge square half hard sterling to hand form the single piece ear wire drop and gave them a slight convex curve so the bottom of the ear wire faced the back of the head. And although 22gauge is thin I filed the corners of the square wire round towards the bottom end and used a reamer to enlarge the stringing hole in my natural gemstone beads so that they would easily slip over the sterling wire. To finish the drop style earrings I wrapped 22gauge round copper wire loosely around the gemstones in an orbital pattern tightly wrapping each end of the copper wire around the sterling wire above and below the gemstone beads.

The last tight wrap was a learning experience for me as my copper wire wanted to tighten snugly around the gemstones, this is not what I wanted. I wanted an airy free motion orbital effect in the overall design I found the best way to achieve the space was to slide a spacer object between the beads and copper wrap wire as I was tightening that last wrap. The copper wrapped sterling ear wires turned out to be beautiful and sunlight shines radiantly through the yellow gold of the facet cut Citrine gemstone orbs.

Local Wire Wrapping Jewelry Artists

One local wire wrapping jewelry expert Bobbi Maw of My Wired Imagination a friend and fellow wire jewelry designer teaches classes on Tuesday mornings at Button’s Baubles and Beads my favorite bead and silver wire supply shop. I’ve known Bobbi for almost 2 years and as a talented jewelry artist she’s the one I turn to when I have design questions, she’s always there to help me figure out a connection or a gemstone choice. What I enjoy about her wire wrapped jewelry designs is Bobbi’s skilled use of the gorgeous Swarovski crystals which add a high end sparkling brilliance of luxury gemstones.

There’s another local wire wrapping jewelry artist that I admire for her coil and weaving work in the copper wrapped designs she creates. I enjoy looking at Edi Scheafers copper wire wrapped designs, her wraps are tightly nested next to each other and her coils are nicely spaced.  I respect the advice of these two very talented wire wrapping jewelry artists, they have taught me the importance of making sure my wraps are tight.

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Wire Sculpture

Wire Sculpture

Wire Sculpture

Wire Jewelry is Wire Sculpture

Creating wire jewelry is undeniably the art of wire sculpture. While it is true that a structural building and typical clay sculpture are in their own rights masterfully created on a much larger scale the art of wire jewelry design employs the same sculptural art principles. As an architectural drafter I believe that the drafting phase of a sculptured wire design is the most important deciding factor in relating the proper scale of the completed piece for the proportion of the sculptural elements you plan to use in your design. And I also believe it doesn’t matter how sophisticated your abilities may be, if you sketch your design on paper or use a computer program when building your vision layer by layer, ultimately the drafting or sketching phase is where you will see every aspect of your design start to fit together perfectly.

Personally I love to sketch my sculptured wire jewelry designs by hand, I think of it as my brainstorm process and quite often it’s where I receive a heightened influx of inspiration and find myself sketching two or three versions of the “master” design. I find inspiration can come from anywhere the colors that pop out at me as I flip through a fashion magazine for current trends, an emotion outwardly expressed on a passing face as I walk down the street, a thought provoking phrase, a childhood memory that comes to mind out of the blue. While not all of the wire sculptured jewelry I create has an inspirational beginning, all will eventually provoke a memory, an emotion, or a visionary dream within the mind of a potential customer.

Let’s look at wire sculpture from a different perspective, the perspective of the emotional bond between the artist and the sculpture, the sculpture and the gallery, and the sculpture and the potential customer. Looking at this from the potential customer’s point of view, what do you see when you look at a sculptured figure created in clay on display at the art gallery? Would you think to look beyond the manipulated clay surface to wonder if the figure is a solid mass or understand that the clay may actually rest on a crudely sculpted wire frame? Do you notice how the artist’s manipulated clay image makes you feel, the emotions it provokes when you stand back to admire it? Do you see each passionate stroke the artist made with his or her bare hands to manipulate and form the lump of potter’s clay into the image their emotions express?  

And what do you notice about a skyscraper with its penetrating architectural form impressing itself against the downtown silhouette? Like the clay sculpted figure, most of us would probably take notice of the outer shell with its gleaming glass walls rising up to the clouds before we acknowledge the internal structure, the wire sculpture web of steel beams. To the architectural designer his steel and glass structure like the clay sculpture is much more than the components that comprise the image we see it is the artistic expression of the inspiration acquired by delving into the personality which the customer’s brand exudes.

Wearable Wire Sculpture

We now can better understand the justified relevance of wire jewelry design as an art form and not just a craft to the professional jewelry designer.

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