Conversations In Wire with James Browning: Making A Prong Setting Using Craft Wire On A WigJig

[Music] hi everybody welcome to another installment conversations in wire with me your host James browning I am a sales representative here for the softflex company we are a jewelry wire manufacturer that is based out of California we do have a gallery here in the Sonoma Valley area if you are ever here we would love to see you stop by today I'm going to be working on showing you how you can actually wrap something using a jig so we have the new Olympus Lite jig in stock now and I'm going to show you how to wrap a cabochon which is really simple this is so you think and then this part you can actually sew into a different like other pieces or like if you have some coils or if you want to do some wrapping around it you can use the wire that you have done the bezel with you can wrap that into your piece and then I have a cute little coin pendant that is really simple as well so we're going to show you how to use the jig to make these so let's go ahead and just get started okay so let's talk about supplies that we're going to need for these projects so the first project we're gonna do is this one where we're going to create a simple bezel out of the craft wire and the jig this is really simple and then once you've got this bezel you can actually sew it into your other wire work if you're making a larger piece you can attach your bail or whatever you want to do is this is basically just a way to get a non drilled stone to hang in somewhere so what we're going to need is I've got some 20 gauge craft wire you could use any color whatever works best for your stone I've got a a --get that has no snow hole so this is just a regular cabochon we're going to need a jig this is the wig jig olympus light this is the biggest one that we carry and we're going to need plenty of space because we're gonna make enough of these zigzags to go all the way around the piece we're going to need some tape just regular scotch tape or you can use like painters tape if you have that and then we're going to need the pegs from the white chick also we'll need a wire cutter and sorry those are crimpers we'll need a wire cutter and some round nose pliers so the cool thing about this project is that you don't actually need to take the wire off the spool you can actually work with the wire on the spool and I don't don't need to straighten it out but if you want to you certainly can the process of this really does keep it so it doesn't look too bad when it's all finished so what we want to do first of all is measure our stone so I'm going to take a piece of tape just pretty long and wrap it around the stone here I'm just going to tear off this excess here so now we know approximately how much of a straight line that we need to make so this is it's actually pretty much the size of our wig jig so what we want to do because of the design here we can actually spread these out so you don't have to do the whole thing the whole piece of tape because if the piece of tape is actually a little bit bigger than our jig so we're just going to do one line of these okay so the first step when working with your jig is to create a loop on one end so that it fits over the peg so see now we have a loop and the first peg I'm just going to put it right here so there's the top and what we want to achieve is we want to skip the middle here and we want to come over to the next one down so we're going to kind of do sig zags back and forth but we want to do this one at a time otherwise it's going to be a little bit difficult to get your wire in between so put our first peg and come down and the easiest thing to do when you're working with these jigs is to turn the jig instead of turning the wire alright and then we put the next peg in and we come back so all we are doing is just zigging and zagging back and forth now you can change the size of the the zigzag if you have a skinnier stone but I think this is probably a good standard to go by just skip one if you need to go bigger of course you can just add another row in between and we're just going to go back and forth see so this is super easy and it's a nice smooth line as long as you're keeping good tension on your wire and you're using the jig to turn back and forth because if you're trying to do this by hand you're going to see more of a wobble to your wire okay now I personally have one up run out of jig pegs so I'm just going to start taking from the back maybe there this is back and forth this kind of sort of reminds me a little bit of lace-making where you have to make your design with pins and you work your thread around pins and I don't know if anybody's ever seen that it's called bobbin mace um my grandpa taught me that when I was little so we used to go to fairs and show everybody at what we did and me and my little brother and my grandma grandpa it was fun but it was basically the same thing where you're checking the pin and you're having your thread go around it and it keeps that shape okay almost to the end here so like I said this is a technique we're not going to finish a project but this will give you a basic bezel for you to set your stone in one more thing that I totally forgot that we're going to need are some crimps we just need one crimp for this project it's the easiest way to keep your wires together I'm using a three by three crimp because it's big enough to take both of those wires so you'll need a three by three crimp and then some mighty pumpers so we can get this one out of our way and we can take our project off our jig okay so this is what our end product looks like the next step that I want to show you is to fold this so what we want to do is we want to find a hard surface it's got a nice sharp edge and we want to bend our project over that edge about half way this is a little difficult to do is to just take your time try and make sure that it's nice and even all the way through you don't have to end it all the way in half just enough to get you a nice like corner and then you can go back through and bend it sharper if you want to but this actually I want to bend this a little bit better here now if you're working with a smaller gauge this part would be easier so the best way to do it is to hold one side and fold down the other so basically give yourself some counter pressure now if you don't have patience to use your jig to do this you can always do it like on the corner of your desk or some other place now you've made a perfect seat for you to put your gym right onto so now all we do is we bend our project around and you can adjust the amount of wire that you've made here you can decide where you want to put your prongs this is basically a problem prong set and I'm going to try and put one of the prongs on the point here and see if I can get it to go around right okay so if I want to end this one right on the prong or that the point of the cab I want to have this one come together I think see ya so I want to join these two these two pieces together basically so I think we just need to put our um crimp right there so let's take a crimp and I'm going to just trim off this little loop here okay I'm just going to feed that down through so now both those wires are on the same crimp together and I kind of want this to be in the back so we're going to crimp it down at the bottom here so I'm gonna take my crimper see if we can get this to crimp right trying to escape okay so I got one crimp and let's clip it to the other way so we get a full Crump no crimp the way that I wanted it to now is the time we get to fiddle alright so those two are attached now so I'm going to go ahead and cut off the excess close to the crimp here okay now we can put our stone in and start to close it up and fiddle and get it just the way we want it so I'm gonna use the back of my take things out really quick because I need a hard surface so that I can kind of put this down on okay so with the wig jig the holes don't go all the way through so you've got a nice little flat area to put this down on I'm just pushing it down so I can get a nice flat back and then I'm going to kind of just push these prongs over the best that I can so that it captures the stone and that is that you've got a nice little bevel set and you can work with your pliers if you want to to try and roll these over further if you like or you can just leave it like that it's part of your your design so that is one project and now we're going to work on this one this one's a little bit more involved but it's still quite simple so I'm going to get some 22 gauge and I'm gonna get a coins now this is a simple quarter but if you have like a special coin like something that you got in the foreign country or an antique coin or something like that this is a great process for this so the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna get five pegs that's all we need we four five so I've already done this for a quarter but you may have to adjust this if you have a bigger coin if the coin is really too big you may want to try something else for this product because this jig is the biggest one we sell and it doesn't go to much bigger than the coin itself so I'm going to start by putting one of my pegs out here and then I'm going to do let's see 1 2 3 folder 5 here and then 1 2 3 4 5 here and then 1 2 3 4 5 here and 1 2 3 or 4 5 here so this should fit a coin yep and we want it just to be just enough to go over we don't want it to be too long because it'll start going into the coin and covering it up so we don't that and then we're going to put one more peg sorry so there's six pegs we're going to put it so if this is the center line here we're going to put it right here okay so this is also one of those projects we don't have to take the wire off the spool for we're just going to take out a little we're going to put our loop on the end okay so we want to do is we want to go on top of these pegs and then we want to go around this far one so that would be one two three on this one and then we're going to go so we turn it back to the way that we started so then we're going to go behind this one and we're going to go up and then we're gonna go down to this bottom one and we're gonna go back up and to the inside of this one okay so now this is where it kind of gets tricky I'm going to take out this peg and under this peg and I'm going to lift this up and turn it over you know kind of random but stay with me and I'm going to use that corner that I have here to hook the wire and then we're going to take this off all the way and we're going to go across the back here because we're kind of trying to make a little circle so if we have to fiddle with it we can and then we're going to come behind this now so we have our big long piece which was over this way so now we've got here and we're just going to take our wire we're going to go around three times and then we can kind of fiddle and adjust and make it neat looking what we need to do here is that's going to be the back and we'll cut off the remainder here and then we'll flip it over and we'll put four coin in we're going to just move this out of the way for a second and we're going to fold down our tabs here so we capture that coin Center it as much as we can in that cross there so that we get mostly even prongs and then you can use your pliers if you need to to kind of reposition and squish down them okay and then we have this still piece left here that's the back is not as pretty as I would like it but you can fiddle and do what you need to do to make it the way that you like it so now we need to make a bail out of this so basically we're just going to make a little wrapped loop it's gonna come out bring this out forward and then make your loop around the top readjust and do your wrap so this is really quick really simple be great for like kids next next excuse me kids necklaces if they have something that they really just want to wear because it's their favorite thing ever that's something that this works great for because it doesn't take very long to get done and it still looks kind of classy and this is another thing that you don't have to make the bail on you can just use this as well basically to wrap into a different piece basically just gives you something to simply prong-set your coin and then you can wrap it in like these to a different project but here you have ready-made and it's good to go just cut off this excess wire and you're done so two simple easy projects for wire wrapping that use a jig so jigs that have lots of different uses so if you are wondering how to set something in a bezel but you're not really good at doing freeform wire work the wig jig will help a lot so I hope this was interesting for you guys I know it was a short one but as always I really enjoy hanging out with you and all of this stuff that you saw today are available on our website and our website is triple w dot soft flex company.com and as always if you like the video please feel free to give me a thumbs up and hit that little bell on the corner to subscribe to our Channel and if you have questions or comments feel free to leave them in the comment section and I will get back to you as soon as I can alright thanks again for joining me today and you have a great day thanks I

Channel: Soft Flex Company

Views: 12,417

Keywords: soft flex, soft flex wire, flex wire, craft wire, beading, jewelry making, jewelry making supplies, diy jewelry, soft flex company, conversations in wire, james browning, wire work, wire prong setting

Id: C9LTyesSams

Length: 25min 11sec (1511 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 17 2019