DIY wire wrap a stone tutorials - Basic Wire Wrap Pendant

hi everybody hope you're well thank you for joining me today I know that when you first start wire wrapping you might be a little anxious to do a project that you can finish and have something wearable when you're done as a result just to give yourself a little confidence boost and because that's the whole point is to make something that's wearable that you can give away that you're able to finish so we're gonna start our first project now that we've covered the essential things that you need to get started hopefully you have some tools to work with if not do the best you can but what we're gonna be making is probably the most basic wire pendant that you can make and it's made with a any shape of tumbled stone let's talk about stone choices something like this that you pick up on the beach will work fine something like this which I bought at a local kind of like a New Age store she has lots of tumbled rocks this is a citrine so I bought this I think I only paid a couple dollars for this and that works great as a matter of fact this is the one we're going to start with some things that I don't recommend is anything like this that this is actually a moon stone a chunk but this is a raw piece and it has rough edges they're actually pretty sharp so and this is well which is this is a black tourmaline this also is kind of sharp on the edges and a little bit pokey and the two of these are kind of blocking in square which is going to make them harder to to work with anyway so if you have things like that I recommend keep them in a dish on a table because they work a little better for that than they do for jewelry but something like this see this rack is kind of this I just picked up at the beach so it's been it's been worn by the sand and by the water and it's kind of smooth but it also is kind of flat so that makes it a little bit easier to handle versus something that's completely round like a golf ball that would be a little more difficult so make it easy on self pick something that is easy to rap and that is easy to work with so without further ado ado let's get started okay it's a pretty simple project it only uses 20 gauge wire and so for mine what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna use two 12-inch pieces of wire and you'll find that it's it's not real technical this is meant to be a free-form kind of project so there's not a lot of measuring there's not a lot of technical stuff to it which makes it great for a beginner because when you're first starting you know you want it to be easy and not too many rules and not too many things you have to think about so this is a good place to start and I see a lot of these on I see them on Etsy and Facebook and in groups and things like that and you know they're not meant to be perfect but at the same time you don't want to beat the daylights out of them either you know they it should still look like wire when it's finished you know I also see some that I question the stability you know so make sure that you're using a wire that's heavy enough to hold your stone I wouldn't recommend anything bigger than 20 gauge just because it gets hard to work with okay so what we're gonna do is we're gonna start with the first twist in the wire alright so the way I do that is I cross the two pieces of wire and then with your non-dominant hand of course if you're left-handed this will all be backwards for you and I apologize for that because I can't I can't show you left-handed I can only show you right-handed because I don't do things left-handed very well so anyway so for me and all of us right-handed folks we're gonna hold the wire in our left hand okay but what you want to do is make sure you have a good grip on it you're gonna cross these over and then how I like to do this so that I get a nice tight twist as I sort of bend over my index finger and I put it in here like this and get it nice and close and then I hold the rest of the wire not so much with with my fingertips but back here further in my hand so when I do the first twist I'll show you okay so what you're gonna do is you're gonna twist this wire together and it needs to be fairly tight or it won't stay okay so I'm holding it let me turn the whole thing over I'm holding it down here with these fingers as opposed to trying to hold it up here but I'm putting some pressure on it with this part of my finger you can kind of see this is a gotta be brave got to be tough get your finger in there put some pressure on it try to hold on to that so that your twist stays nice and tight okay and then from there the idea is to give the bottom of your stone and it doesn't matter what you use for the top and what you use for the bottom but the idea is to give that bottom part of your stone a little place to rest so we want it to be not big enough to fall through but big enough to let that bottom have a little space okay so you kind of have to fuss around with this a little bit and keep checking it this is the fiddly part the bottom part once you get this going it's actually it goes pretty quickly it's fairly easy to do provided you start out in a good direction so that looks like about what we need so again same process and you'll figure out which wire has to be on top even after you do your first twist you'll know and then it has to continue the same way if you're gonna if you're going to use your right hand and twist in a forward motion then your bottom wire is the one that needs to be on top when you crisscross otherwise you're gonna have to go around a second time so we're just gonna give that a twist and every time you twist you want to check it because if you go too far you can't really go back so at this point if it was wrong I could still fix it you know put a few wraps in I'm stuck okay so that's gonna give me just a little space where this can rest kind of gives it a little seat it's like you know a swing or a little bench just sit on now the idea with this is that you've twisted your wires together so now as you go up you're going to twist these two and these two the two back ones so you're going to twist the front side and the back side together and then your next twist you never twist the same two wires together it's always alternating so you're going to twist these two and then these two and then these two and then these two if you twist the same wires together twice you're gonna have a big spot where your stone could potentially pop out so that's a mistake that I see being made a lot I think when people get to a certain point they don't quite know what to do and so there there are little confused they get a little lost so that's how you avoid that make sure that you're only twisting the same wires together one time and then you're alternating so the next twist is going to land on the front of the stone in the back of the stone so you kind of want to just get an idea of where you want it to to sit and again this is it's all freeform there's no specific plan for this there's no way that you have to do it so keep it casual and this is like I said this is the part where it's kind of fiddly it's hard to hold on to that's normal you know you could if you really wanted to you could tape your stone with painters tape right into the frame at this point but it does make the wire a little bit harder to twist because what I'm gonna do is take my stone right out of here okay I see where I need to be and I've actually crossed those in the wrong direction so I'm gonna switch them around okay and you put your twist and at this point you don't need to go around more than a couple times if for some reason you've liked the twisted look and you want to go up further with it that's fine you can certainly do that you know there are reasons to do that if you're going to add other elements later on but for this it doesn't really matter simple easy you know don't get too caught up in perfection or symmetry at this point you know this is meant to be freeform it's meant to be easy it's meant to be comfortable and artsy and fun so that's a good spot for that one so again I'm gonna pinch it with my left hand and twist it with my right and just open it back out okay now at this point you want to make sure that everything here is where you want it to be because what's going to happen is we're reaching a point where you're sort of going to come up over this shoulder area of the stone let's call it and once you come over that you can't take your stone out anymore so you need to make sure before you lock it in place and secure it that everything is where you want it to be so for me both sides look pretty good these don't really have a front and a back if you do them correctly they should look they should be wearable from either side so my little helper in the background you'll hear him a lot in these videos he's home with me all the time okay so when you get that adjusted to where you want it to be see I've come just up over this rounded edge so I know that's gonna hold my stone in place so now I'm holding it I can hold it back further against the stone and give it a good twist okay and now that stones not going to come out of there again okay and on this side same thing [Music] and again these are pretty tight but that keeps the wraps neat okay and now this wire can sort of be adjusted Tamar you weren't able to do that necessarily before now that we know exactly how the stone is going to sit in here and it's locked in place you can play with those a little bit so your very last rap at the top your last twist at the top is going to bring all of these together now there's you know there's a couple ways to do this I'm just gonna use some pliers and try to get this to lean over a little bit better the way I like it don't kill your fingers if you don't have to and this is pretty much right at the very center of the top now keep in mind too if you have a really odd shaped stone like this one was you want to make sure that you think about where you want your bail to be where you want your cord to go through so that it hangs the way you want it to hang obviously if I were to have placed the bail over here and tried to hang it it it probably wouldn't look great or balanced or correct so even though if you look at the way the bottom of this piece is it doesn't exactly line up with the bail but the weight of it is balanced so kind of just imagine your center line from the middle of the top to the middle of what you want the bottom to being kind of balanced you know just in your mind sort of balance on each side so that it looks even when you put it on and wear it this one actually is my daughter's which I was supposed to do not know a year and a half ago and I just didn't yesterday so well she's like the Cobblers child who has no shoes but but yeah so try to try to think about balance as you're going along and how you want it to hang and then when you get to the very top I'm going to do this last rap in here and they they don't always end perfectly in the center at the top and you may have to kind of fool with this a little bit so what I'm going to do is cross these wires over and instead of doing a last twist back on itself like I had been doing what I'm gonna do is come around I want to come around the other twist and this is not we're gonna have to go back this way with this guy and what we're doing is building a little neck sort of thing here with these wires because they have to get tucked in they have to go somewhere and we want the bail to be really stable so I'm going to just wrap these around and sort of cover that twisted area now you may have to depending on where you finish on this this one actually worked out about the way about the same way but you may have to do a twist on that piece of wire and then run it up and wrap it around that's fine there's no rules with this so and then what I recommend is these two are gonna be my bail wires okay so I want to bring those up and get them out of the way because the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna trim these guys off you don't need any more of this so when you're gonna trim wires make sure you're trimming the right wires so get the wrong wires out of the way and then I'm just gonna use the flush cutters now get in the habit of every time you clip a wire off see it leaves that pokey little end on there okay so you want to make sure that you're taking care of that so I like to use these micro chain nose pliers and just pull that around you're gonna kind of give it a give it the direction you want it to go get it started and then press it down okay now you don't need to use a great amount of force to do this just enough to bend the wire and then run your finger back over that spot if you can feel the end of the wire you need to keep pressing it down until you're not feeling it anymore just in case I mean we're gonna wrap over the top of this but you know get in the habit of finishing your wires properly and now this one just kind of feel where it sits in trim it off and then the same thing press it down and smooth it out until you can't feel it anymore and you know what you can do is you can use your pliers and sort of if you if you use the plier to kind of twist that wire and press it down at the same time you'll find that you have a much better finish on your wire ends of you know as far as tucking them in okay because we're tightening this whole spiral this whole if you you were to think of it looking down from the top that wire now is in a spiral up on top of the other wire so what you're doing is if you're if you trim that wire off and you twist and press at the same time you're tightening that whole spiral which gives you it's a little more integrity for the piece overall now we're just gonna flatten up these wires here and we're gonna get ready to make the bail so the first thing that we do is take these wires and bend them back you doing this straight up and down is gonna give you a funny looking bail and you don't you don't want that so Bend these back because you're gonna need you'll see it'll fit right in but you need a place for that circle to start and this gives it a good start and then take your trusty colored pencil or whatever you're using to make your bail and I hold it with my thumb so that it doesn't lose the shape and what I'm gonna do with this just because this is a super simple bail and it's not getting any leaving on it and I want it to be stable so I'm going to cross these over each other and that's going to I didn't do it on this piece and I don't like it as much that's what the back would have been and this is the front and I'm I'm crossing these ones over because I want it to be stable I don't want it to move around I don't want it to ever open up so it's a little cross it's not gonna be noticeable later on okay and then when you go to do your rap leave it right on the pencil so that the bell doesn't get pulled out of shape and you're gonna take that wire and now we're wrapping over the other wires going the opposite direction so now we're going down toward the stone where before we were going up okay like I said it's not meant to be perfect so you're gonna have gaps in the wire this wire is gonna fill in some of that but it's not supposed to be 100% perfect okay when you get to your you have this last little tail hanging out at the back what I want to do with these because these are now the top wires these are the ones that if any wire was going to come off it would be these okay and we don't want that to happen you don't want it to ever get loose so you're going to look underneath here and see where you have a space where you can sort of hook that wire around okay and then what we're going to do is we're going to trim off and leave yeah somewhere between 1/8 and 1/4 of an inch just enough to make a little hook on the end then you're going to turn this over with your pliers and I'll show you from the top down so you can see so we have that little that little fishhook in there so what I want to do now is I want to press that underneath again I'm going to try to get this where you can see it so that right there is my little hook and what I'm going to do is get it underneath these other wires so use your pliers to go underneath and the idea is to find a little space where this can curl around so that if on the odd chance it were to catch on something on clothing whatever hair it's not going to pull out and just press it in there until it's it's good and secure in its days now if it pops out through the other side then you know you've you've cut it too long you need to go back pull it out trim it off try again you don't want that to stick out so it should be almost invisible the idea at the end is to say wow where did the end of the wire go okay then put your your pencil back in so that you know you're maintaining your shape and we're gonna go with this piece we're going the opposite direction so now we're you have gaps sorry I fell off camera now where you have gaps from the other piece you're gonna fill in now later on when we learned how to do a coil or a spiral you could actually finish it that way and have a little coil at the top but because we haven't learned that yet we're going to finish this side exactly the same way so we're going to trim it off look for a spot where it can grab on don't need that anymore and again you're going to turn this around in a little bit of a hook shape hopefully you can see my little hook and we're gonna just press it under and then take some time to just adjust anything that doesn't look exactly the way you want it to look now that this is finished I'm going to open it out a little bit because I like the look of these not being right on top of each other and that is how you get a nice tight even wrap with your ends tucked in so they're not going to scratch anyone they're not gonna hurt anyone and your piece is not going to come undone okay now areas like this you have like I have a little gap here so what I would do is I'm just gonna take this and press it not hard not please don't break the stone please don't hurt your fingers just gently roll it back and forth on the tabletop a little bit and you can press those in that way now these stones are odd shapes so it's not going to lay extremely flat and that's okay it doesn't have to when you get this far you'll see that it's really secure it's not going to go anywhere it's not gonna fall out the stones not moving quite honestly if you if you do this wrap and you know at the end if you take a hold of the the bail of your wrap and you wiggle your stone and your stone is moving independently of your frame of your wire you probably should take it apart and try it again and I know that's frustrating but that's how we learn is to do the same thing over and over and over again you know the other thing that you may be able to do and I see a lot of this is where you take your your pliers and give your wire a twist like that and that's fine to do if you're just making adjustments it won't hurt anything it does tighten up your wire but if you need that to hold your stone in place then your wrap wasn't solid to begin with and you probably should go another time try it again and that's that's how that's fun it just takes a little patience it takes some practice it takes getting used to how the wire feels in your hands how the wire works what happens as the wire has been worked with and gets hardened up and those are all things that you really can only learn by doing it over and over and over again okay and what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna wrap this rock without all the talking and without all the jabbering and hopefully my little guy will be quiet and the background is playing games right now and we can get through this so for this one because it's a bigger stone I'll probably use about 18 inches of wire I normally don't measure and that's the beauty of copper wires that it's not real expensive so give yourself some extra room there's nothing more frustrating than when you get to the end of a piece and you're trying to finish it and you're out of wire you don't have enough because then you know in terms of if you're using you know if you're running out running yourself out of bass player that's very difficult to add on so you're kind of stuck at that point so give yourself a little extra room especially if you're not sure you know I mean my stone that I started with the the citrine was pretty small so I only use 12 inches of wire and you can see I really didn't have but you know what does that maybe four inches on one side and an inch on the other side so it actually takes quite a bit of wire to do this wrap so again you're just gonna kind of measure where I want this to be yeah sure what I eating was holding us bottom here that's alright we'll see how it fits when I think excuse me for this piece we're gonna do maybe I'll do a longer twist up the middle just to see how it looks show you different options now this would be a cool spot you know later on in your wider journey maybe you want to add some beads so this is a neat place to attach the beads and have just a few run right down the middle especially if you're using something like a beach rock like this which is just I don't know even what kind of rock this is it's just a plane like a river rock probably granite I don't know I'm not not real good with with rock names I do better with gem names those I recognize easier and this is gonna need a little fiddling around with at the bottom when we're finished that's okay leave it be for now it's not hurting anything it just gives that rock a place to land see the other side looks like you know I can tell right away by looking at this that this will be my back I just don't like this sight as much which is fine doesn't really matter so if I were going to put beads on it I would put them on the opposite side okay so he's already in there pretty tightly I'll go back to the side and that gets them settled in place I don't know why this rock is a him it just seems like it must be whatever it do you personify your rocks I do sometimes especially if they're giving me a hard time so now here's a case of these aren't exactly aligned at the top so what I'm gonna do is wrap this a few times now one thing that I do want to mention to you because I've actually done this to myself before as you're twisting you will find that if you go too tight for too long you can actually snap this off so you need to make sure when you're doing your twist that you're you're giving it enough space okay so you're you're actually gonna back off a little bit each time that you twist just a tiny bit but if you try to make this twist too tiny and too tight you'll snap it right off and that's because as you work with the wire it does work harden so you have to be aware that that's a possibility and this actually looks like it's gonna be fine after all so when I go around with this one and around with the other one until we can I get to the top and I'm doing this all the same way that I did the first one just a quick version of it so you can see it on a different shape bend it to the back crossing over just feel safer to me to have that little cross in there okay and then down and this one's gonna be really really easy to tuck because there's actually lots of space and I don't really care for the way that that looks too much with this little gap in here so I'm just gonna pinch it down a little further turn it under give it a little hooked and so back in so you don't pull the bail out of shape Jim [Applause] there is now there's bit at the bottom we're gonna sort of tell it where it needs to sit and I'm gonna adjust this way right here now you can also put your twist right across the centre of the bottom if you prefer that look your first twist rather than creating this gap it's another way to do it actually I did it on this one it's just a little bit more difficult to balance as you start okay so in order to keep things easy for you I suggest you give that stone a little place to sit and then as you do these and you know what go get some rocks out of your driveway and practice or you know whatever if you don't have tumbled stones you know when you find these all over the place now in little a metaphysical shops and stuff so a lot of people are selling tumbled stones I think I've even seen these at the dollar store in little bags not obviously not citrine stones but you know glass little glass blobs or little River rocks or whatever go get a bag of them for a dollar and just sit and practice make these all day until you're confident until you feel good about it you know I'm just gonna stick a wire through here and see how it how it hangs you can't see that because of the angle but pretty well balanced and if you draw a line down the center you'll see that it's actually wider on this side it comes out further but the weight of it is pretty well distributed because this side has more more on the top and more on the bottom so that's what I mean by balance okay I hope you guys enjoyed that lesson and let me see what you made if you have questions if you have issues if you're running into trouble please let me know and of course if I'm able to help you I certainly will have a great day have fun with your rocks

Channel: Nox Corvum

Views: 13,589

Rating: 4.9253335 out of 5

Keywords: wire wrap pendant, wire wrap pendant tutorial, wire wrap pendant ideas, wire wrap pendant techniques, wire wrap pendants for sale, wire wrap pendant with hole, wire wrap pendant diy, wire wrap, make your jewelry, wire craft, copper wire, wire jewelry, jewelry making, handmade jewelry, wire wrapping, wire wrapping jewelry tutorial, wire pendant, wire necklace, wire wrapped pendant, wire wrapped crystal, wire wrapped stone, wire wrapped necklace, wire wrap tutorial

Id: Ii8xsQP5XSM

Length: 38min 34sec (2314 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 07 2021