Wire Wrapped Crystal with Bead Tutorial

hey everybody i'm yvonne williams with backdrop creations and in this video i want to show you all a variation on this style of wire wrapping in undrilled ungrooved just plain old quartz crystal or really any type of crystal but anything in this shape works out really well so like shiva lingam stones tumbled stones of a wide variety and it's a really great foundation frame for building upon and making some really cool pieces so we're going to be using 16 gauge and i'm using para wire brand wire which does not tarnish does not turn your skin green and holds up very well even if you have acidic skin we've been using using it well there goes being professional um we've been using parawire in our work uh for over a decade and we design and sell jewelry full-time since 2008 so i really stand by it and i recommend it to anyone whether you're a beginner or whether um you know you're a you know a long-time wire wrapper and you just want something that has the same beautiful look as sterling silver and bare copper but without the price and without any of the maintenance or you know having to polish or anything like that so now that being said this technique could work on a wide variety of wire i don't know if i would recommend aluminum uh because it can be very very soft um sometimes and uh i would go as low as 18 gauge if i were using like a half hard wire or full heart even but this is parawire is about a dead soft and if you're new to wire wrapping and you're not familiar with the terms there's dead soft is just as supple as the wire can possibly be and then there's half hard which is well halfway between dead soft and full hard full heart is very much like the wire of like a spring so if you think of like you know uh it does not want to bend and you know it's not very malleable but it's great for making stuff like ear hooks or you know frames and things that you really really want it to keep that shape now i have a tendency to like dead soft wire just because you can always work harden it and hammer it and tumble it and do different things to get it to harden up parawire does not advertise their enameled wire as a particular hardness but in my experience i found it to be typically on the if this is dead soft and this is half hard it's on the between the quarter hard and dead soft area like it's pretty supple uh with some very rare exceptions and then we're going to be doing our wrapping with 26 gauge and the color i'm using is silver plated titanium mandrel pliers bent nose pliers wire snips and some flat nose pliers you may also want to use round nose pliers or maybe like some knitting needles or stick mandrels or something so the tools used these are just what i'm using but give it a try with what you have immediately on hand and see how that works out for you and then i also have this little eight millimeter beautiful faceted green of entering that i'm going to be using because these points that i was wrapping are double terminated so it has a point at either end now this is a red jasper so it was like cut into that shape but it's still very pretty whereas this is a raw uncut like unpolished untumbled just raw crystal the only thing we've done to it is put it through an acid bath to remove the iron deposits to make it very very crystalline and clear and i wanted to show you this this design has a lot of room for variation and it's actually a variation of its video we had done oh a year or two ago at the time of recording uh just using a cabochon and you could use half round wire like how we did in that previous video and i will have that linked down below and then we had done a little bit of adding some like beads and doing like a little like almost a bow tie um i thought it was cute though and these are perfectly reversible pendants as well or you could turn them into earrings or whatever you like and then this is the design that i'm going to be showing y'all how i do today with just a very simple sleek minimalist design and so let's go ahead and get started [Music] the amount of wire that you're going to want to use is dependent upon the size of your crystal for these guys which are the crystal itself is about an inch and a quarter long um i used seven or nine yeah nine inches of wire for this one here today i'm going to be using 11 inches so i'm just gonna snip those are 11 inches and then i'm going to pull off six feet of the 26 gauge wire but i'm gonna do that in just a minute because there's no sense in having it flopping around before we're ready for it and so um we can come through an option if you like is you can and i am going to zoom back out for this because it's a larger motion you could use a piece of denim or leather or something between your fingertips or you could use some nylon jaw pliers all the links and materia are all the tools and materials are going to be linked down in the video description and i'm just holding firmly with my left hand with some pliers and then i'm just running my nylon jaw pliers four or five times turning the wire in my left hand to get it from different angles and this removes any sort of wobbles or not quite kinks but just it really straightens out the wire it does work harden it a little bit but we're kind of looking for that in this project with the coiling that we're doing i don't necessarily recommend hammering um just because it makes the coils a lot it makes it difficult for the coils to slide around nicely and i think you'll see what i mean as we get into it so i know that's a long intro i know i can be a bit chatty but just in case this is your first time wire wrapping or if you're still a noob i wanted to give you what i feel is pertinent information so you can always pop my videos into two time speed if i'm going too slow for you but i do it in real time to give you guys a very real idea of how long this takes me this is not a 5 minute crafts channel so i'm coming now into the center line of our wire with my flat nose pliers and i'm just going to bend to a 90 degree um if you're using a tumbled stone you could do this to whatever shape um like if it's a rounded stone or something let me know if you guys would like to see this done in another tutorial with like a lumpy weird tumbled stone because we could always i mean we're making two tutorials a week so i always need more stuff to uh make videos about and now we're going to test to see how this fits the angle of our point and so you can see there it fits pretty well because we just want to frame this it doesn't have to be perfect and so i'm gonna place my pliers not quite well pretty close to flush actually boop just right there grab and it doesn't even have to be towards the tip of your pliers and these are just a hair under a quarter of an inch the nose of my um flat nose pliers so holding like this i am now going to just bend like that and then i'm going to grab right here and bend like that and that gives us a little bit of a point that this is going to be framing just like that now you may want to experiment and see oh yeah that's fitting nice i like that a lot like even without providing any pressure it's holding on to the stone now i would never be like whoop that's done but uh you know i like it snug and so that's how we'll be doing this and then farther up is where we will be doing um some beads because you can do this without a crystal at all you can just stack beads if you wanted um up the entire length which i think would actually look really cool and i think i'm gonna do some like that um but today like this week i'm making a whole bunch of crystal jewelry like the crystal shapes whether it's uh cut other stones or whether it's natural formed crystals now i do want to try to keep this as flat as possible but we'll deal with that as we get there okay so the 26 gauge you can do this with a 28 gauge you could do it with a 24 um 22 gauge might get a little stiff for your fingers but i'm not going to stop you you know try out again use whatever gauges you have on hand thinner than 18 gauge for this frame wire i think would it be a bit delicate like i really like the 16 gauge i would go thicker if i had it um just because it gives you a really nice sturdy frame but a lot of that it becomes stylistic like if you're using 20 gauge maybe just double up on the frame wire so there's always always always a creative work around work around so i'm going to come in here now and i'm going to try to zoom in let's see how that goes sometimes it doesn't always work out for the best but we'll see so i'm just holding on to about an inch of tail wire and i'm here at the tip of it could be either ends of the frame wire doesn't matter i'm actually going to open that up just a little bit to give my room itself some room to work and i'm going to start making some coils and so i've done 10 and then i'm going to smush just like that if i do more than 10 my wire tends to jackknife whenever i smoosh it down and what i mean by that i can show you here on this piece of scrap so let's say i'm trying to pretend with me that there's some wire there and i'm trying to squish it it'll jack knife that's what i call jackknifing which is not the end of the world but i prefer for it to not happen the thinner your frame wire is the more likely like the thinner your core wire is regardless of project the more likely you are to jackknife and so we're just gonna come in here two three four five six seven eight nine ten smoosh and now i'm gonna do our tail wire here so that's one two three four five and you can see that's kind of wonky and weird that's why we give it the old smush and squish so we've smushed it down together and then this is where i like to use my bent nose pliers to just grab let's see if we can't come in a little closer so you can see that little pokey bit of wire coming up there please pardon my hands i was in the garden this morning these are working hands i am not a hand model i'm just here to teach you stuff and i'm just gripping not too firm because i don't want to smash through the wire but i'm just burnishing this down there we go that's this motion squish so is that five so we'll do six seven eight nine and ten smoosh so that's 30 and what we're trying to do is i want to make enough coiling that we can go from like here how can i point without my hand being in the way i want to go from like here to here with our coiling so i think that was 30 coils let's do let's go bump it to 40 and see where that takes us one two three four five six seven eight nine ten and smush and now i'm gonna zoom back out we can slide this down our wire sometimes it can be hard to scooch it if you pinch to this end too hard you may wait to do that until you get it into its final location if you're using an aluminum uh like a very soft aluminum for your frame wire um sometimes the copper when you smush it like that can bite into it so uh if you have any questions we can try to help you troubleshoot uh you can leave a comment down in you know in the comment area where you can ask here in the live chat for the premiere hey everybody he's here during the premiere um or you can send us an email with a picture of your project oh there's a hummingbird in my feeder oh my gosh that makes me so happy um yeah you can send us an email with pictures and we can try or try our best to be helpful to you but i'm just pushing and it doesn't want to go so i'm going to kind of encourage it along by just scraping my fingernail every couple yeah so i think we're gonna do 45 wraps so that was 40. so we'll do 41. 42. 43 44 and i like to just come around our loose end coming between in 45 now i am going to smoosh in a perfect world our little cut ends always end up on the side that's going to be between the frame wire and the crystal that way it's no pokey bits no chance of catching on anything it'll be pinned there between the stone and the wire so i'm gonna go ahead and open this up just a smidge and i love how this one has a little baby crystal growing on the side like it's two crystals and then a third there so i'm just going to position that in and from here i'm going to wrap around the front and it can be a little bit tricky here you may want to tape your stone in but i find i prefer to not do that because it gets in the way of doing this which is wrapping we want to do one wrap here on the edge and i'm just cinching that down with my fingers so i press my fingernail against it and twist and that cinches down this wire but you don't want to do that too much because i do want the crystal centered so this first wrap can be kind of tricky but be patient with yourself and be patient with the project you'll get there and then we're just wrapping around the back side and then we're gonna go and do a wrap and i like to do three just because it's a nice round number like i don't know you could do four you could do two you could just do one but i feel like it looks a little too delicate so just doing that wrap wrapping across the back making sure that i'm stacking i don't necessarily want to be crossing i mean if you want to do that as a stylistic choice but i prefer them nice and just flat next to each other and just coming around doing that cinching because if we can keep this nice and tight then the less wiggling of our stone the less um they're just the better i think so wrapping there again on the side coming around the back and then coming through here so we're going to count that as our one and now i'm going to go two three four five six seven eight nine ten now you could do wraps as many across again as many times as you want um but for if this is your first time following along with this project i do recommend just following along and doing the two ends because we're going to be filling in on the side here and um once you get down the base it like the foundation design then i feel like uh go wild so that's 11 12 13 14 15. 16 17 18 19 and 20. giving it a nice smush down because i'm going to want to coil up to about here and so i'm keeping track because i'm going to want to duplicate the same amount of coils on this side we could just eyeball it but for those of y'all who like to be extremely particular uh i figured you know why not measure it's good to take a measurement so that you can disregard it then to not take a measurement and then be like oh i could i could have used that so that was 20. so there's one two three four five six seven eight nine ten makes thirty yeah i think we can do 40. because i don't want to we might just do 35 actually so there's one my poor randy's upstairs sneezing two three four five now we can do forty six seven eight nine and 10. i also like to do this i mean the crystal's a little in the way but i prefer to do it because it keeps me from distorting these delicate wires here and now i'm going to sorry there's a red finch at least i think that's what it is it's just so pretty outside in our uh juniper bush such a pretty bird oh my gosh okay sorry it's spring has sprung in our neck of the woods and it is my absolute favorite time of year because i have missed seeing all the color and life and everything over winter so i've just snipped right there gotta focus on bird watching is has become one of my greatest joys because i got this big window here where i craft and i've got all sorts of bird feeders some of y'all have sent us um some hummingbird feeders and some suet blocks and so we put that outside the window and it makes me so happy you guys and i'm just doing the smoosh and squish no pokey bits and now we will do 40 coils on this side now this is actually going to be easier because we can just do it here on the tip of the wire and so i'm just coming in having that little bit of tail wire to hold on to and then we're gonna one two three four five six seven eight nine ten smoosh one two three four five six seven eight nine ten and i try to keep the coils nice and close to each other but it doesn't always work out that way so i just give it a smoosh if i do too many uh coils with like you know if i did like 20 or 25 coils and they're all spaced apart and then i smooshed it things might get kind of springy and weird but what we can do from there is i would just take my pliers and do that same cinching motion and it helps tighten everything up i don't do that too much though because again i don't want it too so tight that we can't slide this down our wire so that was 20 so we're going to go one two and three bring that around so that was three four five six seven eight nine ten makes thirty smash and ten more one two three four five six seven eight nine ten smush that and just slide it right on down our crystal and i'm looking did i do my counting wrong no those match okay and so now from here i'm gonna take this and bring it around and just start stacking right above where our coils finished do a wrap there's one cinching it down but not so much that it pulls the wire out of the center line wrapping around so that's one on each side when you've cinched there's one and one coming around [Music] and cinch that nice and tight and again wrapping so that and if you get any little kinks in your wire i like to come in and just press it with my fingernail and that does a very similar thing on this thinner wire as what using the nylon jaw pliers on the thick wire does so we can just come around and wrap that give it a smoosh and kind of tuck things on these natural crystals there's all sorts of very tiny little details that the wire can get snagged or kind of nestled into which is both a good and sometimes bad thing it's just it's not a bad thing it's just something to be aware of so wrap and wrap and there's that one so now we've done our three wraps on both sides you can kind of nudge it and try to get them to sit however you like and now we're going to go one two three four [Music] five six seven eight nine ten smush and kinda encourage it down a little bit there we go what crap how many was that okay gonna zoom in and try to count so it was one two three four five six seven eight nine ten okay and that's i do try to function in like fives or tens that way i can look at it and be like oh that looks about five that looks about ten um it just you know if i stopped at like eight or just a random number every time it would be very difficult because i'm very distractible but that's fine so there's one two three four five six seven eight nine and ten now on these crystals here that's the wrong one on these crystals here i would at this point coil up until about here and then snip the coiling wire and start in on the other side but we're going to be adding a bead so what i'm going to be doing here um i think i want to add you know that actually looks like a pretty good height it's going to line up okay excuse me so i am going to snip and smush and now sorry i've got wire in my mouth um now that we're not going to be scooching this wire around on our core wire we can smoosh to our heart's content no pokey bits okay so that was 20 coils so we're gonna do 20 on this side as well let me zoom back out because i am just all over the place there's one two three four five six seven eight nine ten and smush and then there's one two three four so from here you can see how there's a good bit of space between those and whenever we smush it it just looks not quite as smooth and perfect and that's okay oh i lost count no i'm gonna have to count again i'm so sorry i had been looking into getting one of those magnified um like ring lights but i just put my phone in the same tripod that i use for recording and it gives me plenty of plenty of zoom so there's one two three four five six seven eight nine ten 11 12 13 14 15 okay and there's 20 and we're gonna scooch that down just like that and then we'll be bringing this around let's zoom back out and we are going to thread on our crystal or our bead rather and [Music] i'm going to zoom right back in so now we have this coming around and i actually want to [Music] feed our wire back through our bead and i'm gonna come in i'm gonna put just a little bit of the wire in and then bend it a bit that way now whenever it comes through it's inclined to travel to this side as opposed to the back side excuse me i'm going to grab it and with my pliers and pull through pull them all tangled and now continue pulling getting untangled from all the handles of the pliers and i just want to make sure that we don't snag anything or get any kinks and i'm going to pull that in nice and tight and this is just going to hold this from going one way or the other and if i were to do stacked all the way up um we'll actually do a separate tutorial entirely on doing like maybe like a rainbow or chakra pendant or something um or a birthstone pendant which i think is a fantastic mother's day gift actually for all y'all the moms out there that you want to make some jewelry for you could do the birthstone of each of the parents and then for each of the children uh just so just like a little family thing like i think that'd be neat but yeah we'll do a separate tutorial on how to get the complete seamless coiling look for just beads but i really like having just a little something in there but you'll notice there was no wiggle on this crystal so i feel pretty pleased with that excuse me again and then we'll do one two three four five six seven eight nine ten give it a good solid smush and just take a look at it it's looking pretty good something that we can do on this side with just the flattened tip of our flat nose pliers is just kind of smush in next to the bead and that'll help us to get a slightly more seamless look so that was 10 11 12 13 14 15. hmm let's leave it at 15. then we're going to come in and snip and smush and now we'll do 15 on this side so there's one two three four five six seven eight nine ten and smoosh so it becomes 11 12 13 14 and 15. so smush like that come in give it a snip on the tail end we've not snipped our weaving wire just the tail ends there and now we'll slide this down all the way and this is where we start getting into the bail so i'm going to grab right here and this is the same way that i did this for this style of pendant too just with the flat nose and i'm going to bend like that and i'm going to flip it over insert my pliers at the same about three or four coils up from where the bead came across and cross and now i'm going to come in right to the side of where the coils stopped and bend upward the kind of the center line of the pendant so again on this side coming in bracing the core wire with our thumb and bend so you want to get those wires nice and parallel and now from here oh let's see i am going to wrap there's one and then coming in a figure eight so i'm wrapping around the back side and you could do any bail pattern that you like here so you could do the half round wire wrapped around you could do this is what i'm going to be showing you all this kind of pattern but with the little side wings which i like so there's that second wire and we can really cinch that in and then around and then around the back so we'll do two figure eights and we can just smush that either with our fingernails or with our pliers grabbing the core wires not super tight but just enough that we can kind of slide and then you'll see the side of the pliers catch the weaving wire and smoosh that in so that was two and now we're gonna go one two three four around both just lashing and we're gonna smoosh and we're gonna squish and now two beats of the figure eight so there's one two that's one beat two two that's the second one and again give it a nice squish and then one two three four squeeze and smush and you can see how that's starting to form and again you can do any sort of weaving pattern you could do beads all up the center that would look really cool you could just do a figure eight the whole time there really is no right and wrong way it just becomes stylistically what you're into so it looks like our bead had gotten kind of crammed off to the backside um and so i'm just gonna push that through to sit like that so that was our four and now there's one two two two now as they start to get really tight the core wires start to get really tight shoulder to shoulder it really does become helpful to do a nice squish every single time everything nice and tight one two three four and then i stopped after the first two i stopped getting real firm and tight-handed with the slashing uh wraps where it's wrapping around both of them just because i do want there to be enough room for me to keep doing the figure eights one two you could even smush at this point and then two two so it's a lot of smooshing but use your pliers instead of your fingernails to save your hands two three four smoosh then one two three four smoosh and we're going to do a lot of this depends on the size of bail that you want as well so one two three four i usually do seven or eight repetitions to make a bail that has a six to eight millimeter inner diameter after it's all said and done so there's four repetitions of the whole pattern one two three four one two three four one two three four the whole time just making sure that we're not crossing back over our work like we want the wires stacked next to each other not crossing over each other and that's going to help so much in maintaining a nice tidy look i'm always working to improve my consistency with my stitching to make it look just almost machine made we want it to look very very tight at least that's what i'm going for because that does not come naturally to me and i like to wherever there's a challenge that's what i like to tackle two three four let's see we've got one two three four five six seven eight oh okay so i actually i guess i do eight or nine one two three four and then i like to finish on the figure eight three four and we're going to leave that wire there for now and i'm going to grab with my flat nose pliers right above where the like right here like right at the base of the bail i guess and i'm going to bend this forward boop just like that and now i'm going to use the six millimeter mandrel or you could use a knitting needle a pen a paintbrush i like my mandrel pliers because i can kind of hold everything but i'm going to come in here first and do a little bit of a y just like that and i'm going to grip and start curling this around because i wanted there to be clearance for my pendant to come through the center here and i like to start by holding on to the bare wires because it can pinch your weaving and i try to just do that on the part of the bail that's going to be kind of hidden on the bottom here there we are and i'm going to make sure that this wire is exiting there we go this way i don't want it trapped in there so now i'm just going to bring that around and i'm going to push these guys up the bare wires on either side just bringing them all the way around again making sure i'm not trapping my wrapping wire so there's that and honestly you could have it go whichever way it's just a matter of your preference of which side you like as the front and i'm going to come in and snip with my flush cutters kind of right there on one side and then on the other side i would finish this differently if i were using thinner wire but with the 16 gauge this is a very stout wire so i feel like it's going to be just fine i'm going to get in here in my thumbnail or you could use your flat nose pliers to just open it up just a little and i really like to take my bent nose pliers and tuck this end right there so that it's not snagging anything so on this side i'm going to grab it and just kind of tuck it in there we go sometimes it can take a little bit to put it in but that's okay and then we can smush them back up a little bit but you just want to make sure that there is no chance or possibility of that wire poking and catching anything because by the nature of how a pendant hangs uh those two wires aren't going to be snagging into the chain and i just want to get that oh there we go you can do however much primping and fiddling with it as you like and from here we can wrap around the front i'm just going to nestle see if we can nestle in between some of our coiling you can see how we did there and it even makes like a little gap you just want to fit the wire in and this is mostly um not entirely necessary i'm going to say again because the 18 or the 16 gauge wire that we used as our core is so stout but i like to give you all options okay and i'm actually going to come around and do that in a little bit of a figure 8 pattern because i feel like it hides the wire better yes oh that's perfect and then we're just going to come in through here and we can even start wrapping i'm going to have it be offset for the first one but we can start wrapping around to where it catches those little ends and this is where i have a tendency to make this the back side of the pendant just because it can start to look a little weird using my flat nose pliers or my bent nose pliers to get in there and smooth things in keep it kind of tidy let's do at least three wraps again just for good measure so there's those three and then i'd like to come up and through and i'm going to finish it by just wrapping here on the side so i've hooked around that one [Music] this one wire i'm going to do once twice and [Music] thrice before pulling it out this way getting my snips in there snipping and smushing that little tip so there's no pokies so again it's completely any loose ends are contained either inside the bail or pinned between the crystal and the frame wire and that is how to make this style of pendant which i think is just the coolest and it's very sleek not too much going on um and yet there's still a whole lot going on so i'm interested in exploring this with uh multiple frame wires with different shapes with stacked beads so let me know what you guys are interested in down in the comments um thank you all so so much for being here i do hope that this was helpful to you if you enjoy our free tutorials and would like to support the creation of more of them consider joining our happy crafter club either on our website back to earthcreations.com or uh on patreon links to both are down in the video description but the best thing you all can do to be helpful to us is to just keep enjoying our videos keep being crafty and uh just keep being awesome y'all so thank you guys so much again for being here um oh we've got a free newsletter that you can sign up for so that you can get notified every time we have a new tutorial shop update or live stream uh and that's at our website packtruthcreations.com as well and the crystals that this is one of the crystals that we had dug up when we were in mount ida arkansas and we sell crystals and our fused glass cabochons and some different gemstones and stuff on our website as well and we do new shop updates every monday and uh yeah thank you guys until next time happy crafting bye

Channel: Back to Earth Creations

Views: 18,924

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Id: yB60JAtTFck

Length: 48min 0sec (2880 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 28 2022