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· Knotting pearls on silk part 3
· Knotting pearls on silk part 2
· On knotting pearls on silk
· Rambles...
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· Labradorite pear necklace
· Sapphire and gold hoop earrings
· Citrine and labradorite earrings
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Knotting pearls on silk part 4
posted by Colleen Shirazi,
November 2, 2008
at 7:59 PM (Pacific)
Oooh! I'm excited...I just glued the ends of my four strands of knotted pearls. Tomorrow I'm going to get up early and try finishing the piece.
Normally it wouldn't take this long. I found the most difficult parts were getting together the right thicknesses of silk, and figuring out how to knot with doubled thread.
I started out with Griffin silk, with the "built-in needle," but ended up using Gudebrod Champion silk in size D, with separate needles. The built-in needle is handy for straightforward knotting, where you don't need to double the thread, but it's not the most practical if you're doing anything different.
With the Champion silk, I made my own built-in needle...just cut the thread twice as long as you need (it's about a yard or meter for a non-choker-length strand, so cut two yards), thread the needle on, and make a double thread. Knot the two ends together and thread on your clamshell. I put a tiny silver bead between the clamshell and the first knot, hoping that will keep the silk from fraying.
Then you string on a bunch of pearls and start knotting. It's not like the Griffin thread, where you have to string all of the pearls before you begin to knot, but it does go more quickly if you string a bunch, then knot them.
I had to do a slightly larger knot than a regular overhand knot...here I just added an extra "turn" on the overhand knot, if that makes any sense. With #0 Griffin silk I had to do more than one extra turn...it was a pain. But with Champion size D, just one extra turn did it.
I learned a few things...even if the knot feels right, you have to inspect it before making the next knot. If there's too much slack, you can still fix it by adding in another plain overhand knot and incorporating the slack knot into it...but if you've already knotted the next pearl, you can't do that.
I tried stretching out the silk while I was working with it. In fact I'm wondering now if pre-stretching the entire thread is a thought, the way you'd pre-stretch stretchy cord.
The knots don't actually have to be 100% perfect, I screwed one up and tried fixing it by threading in some extra silk and knotting that. It won't make it 100% perfect (were I doing a single strand, I'd restring the entire thing) but for this multi-strand piece, I was satisfied with it.
Once you have the materials and method, and your tool of choice (tweezers or awl), it goes pretty quickly.
I'm going to try my four strands on this clasp from Shiana.com:
Labels: multistrand, necklace, pearls
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Knotting pearls on silk part 3
posted by Colleen Shirazi,
October 27, 2008
at 9:23 PM (Pacific)
Still working on my first project! I had decided to make it a multi-strand pearl necklace, and haven't had much time to work on it.
The first strand is finished--large freshwater pearls on #4 silk. I haven't glued it, but the clamshell is knotted in place on one end; waiting for the rest of the strands to be knotted before finishing the other end.
The second strand, of small pearls...eh...I tried doing it on #0 silk, doubled. #4 was too thick and I didn't have anything else on hand. Bleh. I got the strand done, using a larger knot. #0 is so thin, the usual overhand knot is too small. But I don't want to use this technique any more; it's too time-consuming, and uses too much silk (doubled, 2 meters of #0 is just enough to do one standard-length strand of small pearls).
While I was doing this strand, I found you can rescue a knot which comes out a bit too far from the pearl, by adding in another overhand knot, and incorporating the first knot into it. I don't know if this will work with thicker silk (the resulting knot might be too big), but for fine silk, it worked well.
So I need to buy more silk. I'll probably go with artbeads.com. I've ordered from them many times; they're quite reasonable, free shipping, no minimum purchase, and most items can be bought by the piece.
Despite all the head-aches of figuring out the right kind of silk and how you wish to finish the ends (clamshells vs. french wire), it's a good skill to learn. Say you wanted a necklace of large round beads. You could string them on softflex, but knotting makes the strand look so much nicer.Labels: multistrand, necklace, pearls
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Knotting pearls on silk part 2
posted by Colleen Shirazi,
October 21, 2008
at 6:56 PM (Pacific)
Argh! Of course by now I've discovered how different are the thicknesses of silk (or rather, how differing the drill-holes are in pearls!). I tried my #4 Griffin silk on some smaller pearls I had on hand...no dice, not at all. mumbles...
That's one aspect of making anything jewelry, that is not obvious to people who don't do it. Unless you own the bead store, you're perennially short of at least one item you need to finish the piece, at least until you've been short enough times to own tons of materials. I even tried altering my design to use larger pearls, but they all have these miniscule drill-holes.
It's just as well, since I need to restring another piece; hopefully I can cover both in a single bead-shop visit.
The other piece is more complicated and I'm not sure how I'm going to do it. It's four strands of very small pearls, with the four strands coming together at the top of each end of the piece, joining into a single strand, which is then attached to the clasp. The thread (it looks like cotton) at the tops is exposed and beginning to fray.
I'm thinking if I redid this on silk, and used french wire to cover the exposed parts of the silk, it should work, but still it'll probably take a couple tries before I get it the way I want it.Labels: multistrand, necklace, pearls
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On knotting pearls on silk
posted by Colleen Shirazi,
October 17, 2008
at 10:00 PM (Pacific)
I finally got around to trying this. Why did I wait so long?????
It's actually not too difficult, though it is time-consuming (then, everything to do with making jewelry tends to be time-consuming). I got the silk and clamshells yesterday, along with a strand of pearls, at Bead Castle in Berkeley. The owner was very helpful and recommended Griffin #4 silk for those particular pearls.
I did my first knotted strand yesterday. Since I don't own a bead awl, I used a very skinny mandrel from a jump ring set. This worked okay (the mandrel is too skinny to make jump rings with, btw) but you really need either the awl or knotting tweezers, or something very similar. I got the tweezers today. The awl seemed scary sharp, and the tweezers looked handier (if your knot looks as if it isn't going to be placed correctly, you can still get it apart again with the tweezers).
I wasn't 100% happy with my first strand, but I'll have to say it looked pretty decent. Like anything else in jewelry making, you want it to be perfect, so you have to practice some.
So I'm planning to redo my initial strand--started it tonight in fact--and make a four-strand necklace. I want to do something like this (from Blue Oyster Pearls Necklaces Catalog) but simpler, something I can wear to work. I have the one large pearl strand, but I'm planning to use it with three strings of small pearls, rather than use five kinds of pearls.
Having just begun, I can't advise much, but I didn't glue the knot into the clamshell on my first try. I was too chicken. A good thing, since I need to redo the strand!
I can say it's well worth the effort of knotting; stringing beads straight is not the same. The knotted string drapes better and imo looks better too. Plus the more obvious advantages--the nacre of pearls strung without knots (or spacers) is supposed to wear away eventually--and knotting adds some instant length to the strand, meaning you can stretch out your pearls and cut the weight of the necklace.
image courtesy www.ottofrei.comLabels: multistrand, necklace, pearls
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Rambles...
posted by Colleen Shirazi,
August 22, 2008
at 9:49 PM (Pacific)
Ah...what have I been doing lately. Not much, nothing new. More testing than development. :D
In that sense though, testing is as important as development. It's less spectacular, but testing is what determines whether something will last.
Here is a tutorial I stumbled upon: ES Designs >> how to make sterling silver hand-forged hoop earrings - tutorial. What intrigued me were not the earrings, but, rather, the methodology. That's how I want to make jewelry. Not in the manner of, bang together this and that.
Many of my pieces turned out to be surprisingly wearable. Some, I've become sentimentally attached to, as markers in time, showing where I was when I made them. Take these for example:
Beyond the appalling photography, there is everything wrong with these earrings. I don't wear large hoop earrings. They're made of regular sterling silver wire; I've long switched to argentium. I didn't know how to close them, so I made up the idea of wrapping the wire onto the top bit of the hoop. Even the top loops are badly formed.
I've since reversed them (yes, I made them identical rather than symmetrical). I don't use that type of stone anymore: low grade blue apatite tumbled nuggets (though the stones are much prettier in real life than in the pic).
But once, on casual Friday, I saw them in the box and decided to show them some love. I put them together with a very casual outfit, and got compliments on them, which rather shocked me.
What I recall when I see them, is how I made them. Blogged on April 30, 2007 as follows:
I would rather have made these with lapis stones, but recall I'm still on my "bead cold turkey," so I used some blue apatite stones instead. Pretty pleased how they came out, would like to try making more hoop earrings.
Bead cold turkey? That brings a smile. I remember trying to "fix" the stones on the hoop by hammering the wire either side. Surely a few good whacks would do it, right? Not so. The beads kept sliding no matter how flat I made the wire. I ended up pressing the tiny silver spacer beads with my chain-nose pliers. (Note to future beaders: buy the seamless spacer beads.)
Eventually I got the thing to work. And so, more than a year later, I had these rather crude-looking earrings on, and they looked--not like something I would wear every day--but quite pretty, nevertheless.
Then there's something like these:
These are pretty much all wrong too. The obvious factor is a waste of Madeira citrine, a beautiful stone. Each stone has a red glow, like a glass of red wine, inside its clear golden brown. Here, the stones are all heaped together. You get a glimpse of color, but can't really distinguish it.
These, I'd like to redo, but the essential materials and idea must remain the same. Why? Because these were based on a tree full of red-breasted birds my daughter spotted, one dreary grey day. She was very excited. We don't get red-breasted birds around here...and this ain't Virginia, we have no cardinals. (How I miss those bright red cardinals in winter! Everything completely colorless, snow and ice, bare trees and dead grass, but then you spy a lone cardinal in his vivid red coat.)
She had the notion of taking a picture, and I tried to snap it:
It didn't come out well, but imagine five to six times as many birds, all with red and orange chests, on naked grey trees.
So that's the theme and I'm sticking with it! I'll want something better-made though, more delicate-looking.
What's been frustrating is a sheer lack of time and energy. Yet I try to see it positively too. Sometimes you get stuck in a rut, where you feel you need to keep going, you pour a lot of work into it. If you take a break from the rut, you can step back and plan better, and work more slowly, but produce much better work.
Perhaps some of what you did before was a draft. Then other pieces will be too sentimental to you to rework. You shouldn't redo them all. Always keep a piece as is, as a snapshot of where you were when you made it. (However bitterly ashamed you may be of the crudeness of the early work.) Some day you may like to take it out again, and wear it.Labels: beading notes
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Rambles...
posted by Colleen Shirazi,
July 22, 2008
at 6:14 PM (Pacific)
Poor blog... I have made new jewelry, but haven't had time and energy to photograph it. :(
The best piece I've made since...ah...fiddling around crimping a horizontal bar inside a hoop...is a pair of earrings made of (argentium) sterling chains, small aquamarine faceted drops, and small green amethyst faceted pears.
These use a graduated style, smallest chain on the outside, longest chain on the inside...each chain terminating in an alternating stone. On the very inside I put a chain without a stone. That's really the thing...the stoneless silver chain moves more freely than the "stoned" chains, but it's also the longest, so the entire earring is a sort of study of movement. The inspiration here was replicating falling rain.
I did a filigree necklace, but the design wasn't original, it was based on something I saw on Etsy. I haven't soldered anything yet...the filigree pieces are held together with fine gauge wire.
Humm, what else...I did some goldfilled wire hoops with a horizontal bar across each. To keep the bars steady, I covered the hoop above the bar with fine gauge wire. On the bars, I have a line of graduated wire "fringe"--you make a loop on one end of the wire, hammer out the other end, then file the end smooth and round. I was trying out designs to make in karat gold wire rather than goldfilled. I think this design would be nice that way, but it was way too complicated...mmm...I'd have to come up with a real template before venturing to make it with the spendy stuff. Perhaps I'll make a silver version first and get the exact measurements.
I made a few quick 'n' dirty earrings, on a whim...just select some matching stones and connect them. I did a carnelian pair and a nephrite jade pair. I still have more agate stones to do but haven't done them yet.
I made a four-strand turquoise necklace I'm not sure of yet. It looks nice actually, but I just made it, so will have to wear it more to see if it needs anything.
Ah...I did some post-back earrings, mainly to see how easy or difficult it would be to make them. The design uses a wire spiral to cover the earlobe, and I hung a wire hoop off of that. This is another "dunno yet" design.
I have a necklace of tourmaline faceted hearts my daughter designed...and a pair of earrings using tourmalines from the same strand, hung on oxidized textured sterling chains.
There may be more but nothing comes to mind...lol...I did make a simple pendant from a chrysoprase bead carved into a lotus shape, but I'm not happy with it. It's way too simple; I'd like to make a necklace from that bead, hmmm...I have lots of other green stones, so maybe I'll do something with it this weekend.Labels: beading notes
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Rambles...
posted by Colleen Shirazi,
April 6, 2008
at 2:24 PM (Pacific)
The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of using a tiny round bead, instead of a crimp (see previous Rambles...).
What I had on hand were crimp tubes. They actually don't look bad, crimped on a hoop like that, but a tiny round bead would likely look much better.
I've been turning it over in my mind about soldering. Wondering how feasible it would be to solder an earring frame, say, that already had dangles on it. Would it melt the wire on the dangles? For briolettes, I've been using a double loop at the top. It would be more difficult doing such a loop directly on the wire.Labels: beading notes, earrings
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Rambles...
posted by Colleen Shirazi,
April 5, 2008
at 8:26 PM (Pacific)
I got to finish some earrings today. Boy, were they a pain to finish! I had this idea of making a round hoop, with a curved bar inside it, like a much simpler version of these: Gokul earrings. Just the bottom hoops with the bar inside, and stuff hanging from the bar and from the bottom edge of the hoop. (Not even the fancy dangles hanging from the bottom, just regular little dangles.)
Thing is, I haven't taken up soldering yet. I don't think it's a big deal, but it does represent cost, both in time and in tools and materials. Soldering will be my second phase of jewelry making; I'm thinking of taking it up next year.
Anyhow...I had no idea how I was going to do the curved bar inside the hoop. I knew it wasn't going to be as simple as these:
Here, the shape of the hoop keeps the horizontal bar from sliding around. I knew that wasn't going to happen with the round hoops, but figured I'd go ahead, make the hoops and take it from there.
So I made the hoop and bar...how to keep this thing from sliding around? These are the versions I ran through:
In figure 1, I tried wrapping fine-gauge wire tightly around the sides of the hoop, directly under the curved bar. This didn't work, no matter how tightly I did the wrap. If you pushed firmly on the coil of wire, it slid down the side of the hoop.
I then tried wrapping fine-gauge wire above the curved bar, on either side of the hoop (figure 2). This worked, because the bar could not slide, but looked funny, since the wrapped wire covered only the top part of the hoop.
Figure 3 entailed covering the rest of the hoop with the fine-gauge wire. I've seen this done in finished pieces, but it didn't work here. You'd have to finagle the dangles on the bottom of the hoop...I had mine just hanging from the hoop itself. So the only way to do the wrapped wire, would be to use a continuous piece of wire. Anything else, the bottom wrap of wire would slide down...unless you wrapped it right up against the dangles on the bottom of the hoop. In which case, the dangles wouldn't really dangle, they'd just be stuck in a piece.
So I'm thinking, do I really want this entire earring to stand or fall, based on a continuous strand of wire?
Figure 4 was my solution. I didn't use fine-gauge wire at all. As an aside, I rather disliked the fine-gauge wire experience. I've used it to "glue" components together, I don't mind that, but the idea of covering the entire frame with wrapped wire irked me. The wrapped wire added to the weight of the earring, and there wasn't much practical way to use a continuous piece of wire...you were stuck patching the wraps together, and ending up with little odds and ends of wire trimmings (I know, if you did this often enough, you wouldn't have much waste).
In the end I just used...crimps. That's right, crimps. I put a crimp under each end of the curved bar. And it worked.
Thinking on it now...another solution could be to use a tiny silver bead under each end of the curved bar. You could then hammer the wire under the tiny bead to keep the bead in place. I've done stuff like that although it's tricky (you really have to hammer the wire to keep even a small bead in place).Labels: beading notes, earrings
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Rambles...
posted by Colleen Shirazi,
April 2, 2008
at 5:37 PM (Pacific)
Hi! Haven't had much time to blog lately...
It's occurred to me...a new earring design usually takes me several days, at least. Sometimes longer. Once I have the design, it takes me several hours to actually fabricate the earrings.
I was thinking of that today...from the beginning, I had wanted to develop several designs and just use those. Part of it is sheer laziness, no doubt, but I believe in modularity anyway in my life. If I find a sweater I like, I'll buy the same sweater in as many different colors as I need, rather than try to find a different sweater. If it works, it works.
So far:
I've already made another of this pattern, using a tiny prehnite faceted onion as the top stone, and three green amethyst faceted pears on the bottom (the pears were too big to use five). I'm thinking of making a garnet pair as well.
This is good too. I'm planning to make a green pair...going through my clothes today, I realized how much green I wear. Blue is useful too. Thinking on it, I should make a green and a blue pair of every design.
This works, but a caveat: I got rid of the emeralds.
This is better for a larger stone...and might look nice with more unusual chains, like a figure-8 or textured chain. Even though I like this flat cable chain.
This is an efficient use of tiny stones! I have a gold version, but need to redo it--I tried putting gold beads on the outside of the stones, instead of just using them to space out the stones. That doesn't work, since the gold beads are too light weight, they end sliding up the sides of the hoops. Plus, I think I'll do a simple-loop headpin rather than a wrapped-loop one, for the gold version.
That's it so far! I have other earrings I've made, but those are more one-of-a-kind, I'm not planning on reusing the design.
I'm also thinking of a round hoop, with a curved bar in the middle...you hang stones from both the curved bar and the bottom of the hoop.Labels: beading notes, earrings, pics
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Rambles...
posted by Colleen Shirazi,
March 26, 2008
at 10:34 PM (Pacific)
Blogged some here: Fashion Notes: Trekking through Etsy. No original work, just some pics from various Etsy merchants.
I did go ahead and make spiral earrings. It's experimental...in a way, I don't care whether it's a commercially viable design, since I'm not selling it. I just want to know how it feels to wear them. The ones I made feel different on, having a long "stem" to balance off the spiral. Pretty neat really. I have a small moonstone rondelle hanging from mine. My daughter did the wrap on one of the moonstones.
Today I was fiddling around with my new work wardrobe, seeing if I had enough earrings to match my work clothes. Discovered I have an enormous amount of earrings. Well to me it's enormous. I've never owned so many earrings before, even though of course I don't mass produce them. It's just that, over the past several years, I've been making earrings, and now happen to own an almost embarrassing number of them.
I'm weaker as far as necklaces. Forget about bracelets! One thing at a time. (I'm still a bit fuddled by the sheer number of earrings. I actually have earrings to match practically everything.)
Been wearing my London Blue topaz necklace a lot lately. It's an appallingly simple design, but the stones are nice...they look flat in pictures, but in real life, the deep blue just jumps out. I think because it's not just blue...there's grey in there, green, brown almost...I've decided it's one of my favorite stones.
I'm a bit aggravated...I ordered some aquamarine, so I could make a specific project. I've finally found a good source of aquamarine, I no longer buy it at bead stores nor even at bead shows, where it tends to be dyed. And they sent me the wrong size aquamarine. They've been good overall, but it's still a hassle because I have to send the strand back. I'm hoping to do that tomorrow.Labels: beading notes
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Rambles...
posted by Colleen Shirazi,
March 23, 2008
at 5:36 PM (Pacific)
Happy Easter!
Was fiddling around with some earrings today...I still need to finish the three-hoop necklace. The front is fine, but I finished the back with two grey moonstone rondelles. I love how the grey color looks, but the drill-holes were small. I really prefer using heavier wire in back to finish a chain, plus it could stand to be a bit longer anyway.
Anyhow, about the earrings. These are to go with my mom pendant:
Only the earrings use just my kids' birthstones (peridot and pearl). It took me a while to make them though the design itself is quite simple.
For one thing, I've found it tricky making matching sets of jewelry. Usually the earrings end up too fancy; they work well on their own, but are "too much" when worn with the matching necklace.
At the opposite end are earrings that work only with the matching necklace and are too simple or blah to be worn on their own or with anything else.
For this exercise, I wore the necklace while doing the earrings, and came up with a design of a gold bead, a baby coin pearl, and a peridot faceted pear. The peridot I've had for over a year (it's the same one here); the baby coin is the same as in the necklace. The gold bead is actually karat gold albeit hollow in structure. I've liked adding karat gold beads here and there in my work; nothing else looks like real gold (unfortunately nothing else costs like real gold either, hence the idea of using it sparingly).
I love these baby coin pearls! I saw them used extensively on the Midori Jewelry site and got the idea there. They're quite a bit more versatile than the larger coin pearls and add a nice glow to whatever you're making.
All three components of the earrings are very lightweight. I've been making heavier earrings and I like them, but you can't wear heavy earrings every day.
I hope to have some pictures soon.Labels: beading notes, earrings
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Necklace with three hoops and moonstones
posted by TheBroadroom.Net,
March 22, 2008
at 4:34 PM (Pacific)
Not sure about this one yet. It's experimental, because these aren't soldered hoops; they're strictly bent and hammered.
On a personal level, I like geometry, and therefore geometrical shapes. I've had the notion of making an abacus pendant for months, not because I know how to use an abacus :) nor even because an abacus is itself useful. It's the concept of making a square pendant that's attractive to me.
On my (never-ending) pile of pieces to redo, is a simple square coin pearl pendant:
I would do it differently now of course...but it's been sitting there since forever, and I still think about it. How nice to wear a simple white square of nacreous pearl. Otherwise, frankly, I find square pearls impossible to work with. You can't seem to do much with masses and masses of them; they stand out best individually, when you want the square shape somewhere.Labels: chain, hoops, moonstone, necklace, pics
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Labradorite pear necklace
posted by Colleen Shirazi,
March 20, 2008
at 7:08 PM (Pacific)
In the top pic, I was leaning at a funny angle, trying to capture the schiller in the stones. It hangs much more the way it does in the bottom pic.
I made this for special occasions, imo it's too much for every day. Unless you can pull something like that off. :)
BTW labradorite is light for its size. I thought these stones would be way heavy, all together on the chain like that, but they're not. I'm not even sure this needs a counterweight in the back--I haven't finished the back, I haven't even cut the chain yet. I'm using a chain sample I got, so the last thing I'll need to do in this piece is cut the chain itself.
For this necklace (top center image):
...I put a small smooth citrine coin in back, on an extender chain. I got the idea from Midori Jewelry. The necklaces have this neat little green "melon" in back. I didn't want to copy the melon, of course, but I liked the idea of finishing the pieces all in the same way. So I'm thinking of putting another citrine coin in the back of this piece (I've had these coins since forever and couldn't figure out what to do with them until recently).Labels: chain, goldfilled, labradorite, necklace
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Sapphire and gold hoop earrings
posted by Colleen Shirazi,
at 7:03 PM (Pacific)
This is a somewhat lower grade of sapphire. Still a tiny bit translucent, but without the rich color of blue sapphires.
I was very pleased these beads had been hand selected...I bought them online, three packages of four beads each. Someone had gone through and made sure I got two of each color. That's how I could make matching earrings.
This is goldfill and vermeil, with karat gold beads.Labels: earrings, gold, goldfilled, hoops, sapphire, vermeil
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Citrine and labradorite earrings
posted by Colleen Shirazi,
at 6:55 PM (Pacific)
Here's my first attempt at using a herringbone weave. I realize I linked to it earlier from the beauty & fashion blog, but now that I can get screenshot thumbnails of the posts here, figured it would be useful to post here for future reference.
Ultimately I was disappointed in using half-hard wire for the weave, because I found it impossible to bend the wire just so on the sides. I think the bezel ended up covering too much of the stone. I haven't given up on the weave itself, but I will wait until I can order some soft wire in this gauge.Labels: citrine, earrings, labradorite, pics, wire
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