Tackle that stash - Wire knit rope necklace with Boswana agate and lampwork

I have had these Botswana agate chips around for a while, they were a gift. Up till now I didn't have an idea for them. They were not regular in size and shape, just like chips are, and they were not drilled, either.
The only thing left was to cage them in wire which is what I did with one of my rope necklaces. It's a long necklace without a clasp. As the agate was mostly pink and grey, I picked the rose gold wire for knitting the rope.

I still have my problems with asymmetry, but we did talk about comfort zones lately as you might remember, so I did go for it. Some of the chips were randomly caught in the rope along the length, but I also added two "bubbles" full of agate and one with two grey lampwork bubble beads in it.
It's funny, when I learned chain stitch in elementary school for the very first time, we had to make a shopping bag. I picked pink and grey, since then these are two colors that belong together for me (they will turn up in a future project as well, by the way).

And here it is now, this week's stash tackler.

Tackle that stash - Wire knit bracelet with tiger eye

It's cold today, not wintery cold, but April seems to have forgotten that its time is over now. I connect warm colors with May, so that's what I went for with today's piece.
Not that it really helped, I'm still cold!

When rummaging through my stash I found brown tiger eye beads. The amount seemed just right for a bracelet. There is nothing more annoying than beads running out before a bracelet or necklace is long enough because you can't do anything about it except maybe buy new beads and that wouldn't quite go with this challenge.

It was easy to pick the right wire for this project. Warm and bright gold colored copper wire team up in this knitted bracelet. Actually the warm gold looks a lot like pure copper, but not completely, and the bright gold is more of an orange tone. Perfect for the brown of the tiger eye!

I picked antique copper tone findings to finish the bracelet off and voilà!

It is available in my DaWanda shop now.

Tackle that stash - Delicate Cantera opal pendant

You have seen this tiny Cantera opal before, in this post where I showed the magic world you can see in it.
As you know, tiny cabs or faceted stones are a bit of a challenge to use in wire knit or crochet. To do the opal justice, but also keep it safe in its bezel, I made very small knit stitches. That way I was able to only cover the matrix, but leave the window to the magic world open. Actually I keep staring into that window! I just love opals.

For that little bit of movement that I like so much I added a small amber bead dangle. It's a pity I only had one opal in that size, I think this would make a beautiful pair of earrings if I had two.

To compliment the delicate pendant, I crocheted a slim rope in the same color.

Tackle that stash - Faux amber and wire knit ring and earrings

A few years ago I got a little bag full of faux amber cabochons. They were different sizes, different colors, different shapes and over the years they have made for some big fun. I made earrings, rings, necklaces, pendants, in fine silver or in copper wire, in wire knit or crochet technique and sometimes I even mixed both.
Often when my muse was out of town I grabbed the little bag and matched pairs, sets or contemplated the best bezel for a unique shape like the little rounded pyramid.

Finally the bag is almost empty. There are a few last small round cabs left now after I took two of them to make this pair of starburst earrings.

Available in my DaWanda shop

And then there was the cab that had been haunting me from the very beginning. Shaped like half a circle it defied all my attempts to put it in a bezel. More than once I thought now was the time to show it who was the master and more than once I kept ripping up what I had made half way through. If I ever heard a cab snicker, it was definitely this one.
I don't give up that easily, though. Eventually the time comes when I put on my determined face and do the job, and that's what I did.
With this ring. Ha!

Available in my Zibbet shop

Wire knit, Viking knit and netting

"Why do you call it knitting if you are using a crochet hook?" "I like your crochet." "Is that woven wire?" "You can't knit with a crochet hook." "It's called knooking." "Is that spool knitting?" "Oh, but that's Viking knit!"

I admit it can get confusing. I blogged about the differences between wire knit and wire crochet before, in this and more elaborately with sample pictures in this blog post. I didn't want to repeat myself here, so please look up these two posts if you want to know more.
The wire knitting I do is also not the same as Viking knitting although I get why people may think that at first. Knitting is knitting after all, right?
Actually it's not.

A few things before I show you my samples:
I am by no means a Viking knit expert, so far I have only dipped my toe in. For the sample I skipped the making of a base part. This is NOT a tutorial, this is just supposed to show you how differently wire knit, Viking knit and netting look.
I do knit with a crochet hook. I could use knitting needles and end up with the same look, but with a crochet hook I feel I have more control over the wire. I call it knitting because the result are not crochet stitches, they are knit stitches.


This is a knitted wire rope sample and this is a very short explanation of how it's made with an ordinary crochet hook.
First you make a row of chain stitches (which is different from the first row if you knit with needles) and close it (if you make a flat piece, you just work your way up back and forth, but the technique is the same). Then you pull the wire through the first loop with your crochet hook, towards yourself and bend it upwards over your loop to avoid the wire slipping back out. You will see that it looks like a knit stitch already, and that's how you go on. Go through the next loop with your hook, catch the wire, pull through and bend upwards.
The wire in the last row is in no way anchored to the other stitches and unravels easily if you are not careful.
You don't have to cut a length of wire off your spool for this technique. If you use it with beads, however, you have to put the beads on the wire before you start knitting.
You can use a draw plate to even out your rope or make it longer and slimmer.

This is a simple single Viking knit sample.
The loops are woven around the loops of the last row. No unraveling there. You can use a mandrel, a dowel, a special Viking knit tool that helps you with the start, a pencil ... I used a large knitting needle for this sample.
There are different Viking knit variations like double or triple knit.
You have to have a length of wire cut off the spool to be able to weave the loops, but you can add wire while you go along. To even out the chain and make it longer and give it a different look, you can use a draw plate.

Last but not least I made a small netting sample. In this case loops are not woven around loops, but around the wire between two loops which makes this a very open net.

I hope I made the differences at least a little clearer, but should you have questions, I'll do my best to answer them!

I do have to say, however, as I keep getting asked that I don't make tutorials and don't plan on starting making them. Thanks for understanding.

Tackle that stash - Black wire knit ring with acrylic cabochon

Is it Friday already? I completely forgot! Not only did I have to look after my Esme since last weekend who was sick and refused to eat even the finest snacks I had to offer, but I have also been working on a project for which I had to order the beads *gasp* It's a bead looming project and if I am missing one or more colors, there's nothing I can do. Now I only wish I knew where I have hidden my polymer clay ...

Oh well. I set myself a challenge, so I had to make something quickly, a simple design this time.

Tackle that stash - Classic elegance

If you make a bezel for a stone, there are three things you want. You want to compliment the look of the stone without hiding too much of it, you want the stone to sit safely in its setting and you want the piece to have your own style.

With wire crochet or wire knit it's not always easy to make sure the first two work together in the best way.
This last pendant I made features a dark green cabochon in a golden wire knit setting. It was the first time for me working on the edge in a way that not only shows most of the beautiful stone, but also a delicate golden border.
A lovely pearl is adding a little movement to the pendant - yes, I still am in "dangly mode"! ;-)

You can find this in my DaWanda shop now.

Tackle that stash - More dangly earrings

I love dangly earrings, have I told you that before? ;-) Yeah, yeah, I know I have.
What coincidence that I found a pair of lampwork cabochons that practically begged to be earrings in my stash.
The golden wire knit settings and the shimmering golden AB cubes that dangle from them are a beautiful contrast to the organic colors and patterns of the cabs, and the rows of tiny black onyx beads are a special accent.

Tackle that stash - Wire knit bracelet with glass cubes and lampwork button

Cubes. Tiny cubes. I remember when I first discovered them and just had to get different colors. It's not as if I didn't use any of them, mind you. I loomed with them (even if that is still in the WIP drawer due to my weak Peyote skills, but that's a different story) and I knitted with them. Then things calmed down in the cube section of the drawer.

That's over now. I dragged all of them into the light of day and started making cube soups. I loomed a bracelet for myself. And I got back to a design of mine that I love.
To close a bracelet is not always easy for everyone. You should think I'm used to doing it, but there have been times - particularly mornings - when even I have given up because it was obviously not the day for a bracelet with a clasp. That's when I decided on making bracelets with button holes and beads for buttons, mostly lampwork beads and one agate bead.

This bracelet is by far the widest one.  The mix of light and darker blue cubes sparkles beautifully. As I couldn't find my silver colored wire, I went for midnight blue. It was probably fate, the dark blue was the perfect contrast for the cube soup.
And as luck would have it, I found an orphaned blue lampwork bead in my stash, too. I'm afraid I can't say which artist made it. Even if I have an idea, I can't be sure, so I better don't name anyone at all.

I'm really happy with how the piece turned out and the temptation to use the other cubes in bracelets as well is big, but who knows, there might be a different idea just around the corner, so I won't give in to the temptation.

If you want to see more pictures and more detail, you can find them in the listing of my Zibbet shop.

Wire calling

With all the bead looming I have done recently my wire started to feel neglected and I heard it calling to me.

It will never stop being fascinating to me how different the feeling is if I pick up the bead loom or the crochet hook.
Once I get to the bead loom, I usually have a pattern ready that I have to follow and there are not many changes I make during the process.
The hook, however, lets me change paths in the middle of a piece. Although you don't see much of the wire here from the front, the back is built up from several randomly knitted layers which make the pendant sturdy and helps the crystals to sit right.

The pendant is now available in my DaWanda shop.

Khepri

I'll make it short. I knew about the scarab beetle pushing the sun, I knew the image of the scarab with the open wings, but I didn't know about Khepri.
Khepri is the Egyptian god associated with the scarab beetle. He was believed to push the sun across the sky and he was the one to bring up the sun again after the night was over.
Like I said, I made it short, very short.

Well, someone mentioned Khepri to me after seeing one of my pendants with a wire knit web all around the stone and inspired me to try this version.

Of course it is very stylized and you don't see the inspiration behind it without being told, but it's only the first one. I might get myself a scarab focal for the next one.

This pendant can be found in my DaWanda shop now.

Pack it up ...

... and wear it. Whatever you want, it just has to be small enough to fit into this little pouch I knitted from wire.
Yes, you can open it up and close it again. There's a button hole in the flap and a dark blue crystal button.

May it be the lucky penny you just found, a little shell from the beautiful trip to the sea or your birthstone, you can wear it in this pendant.

Or how about the last sweet note your love left on the kitchen counter in the morning? Anything goes.

The pouch pendant is available in my Zibbet shop now. If you want a different size or color, I'll be happy to make one for you.

Green and black

It wasn't planned that way.
Sometimes if I am kind of restless, I pick up some wire and my hook. I either make a bezel for a cabochon and see what happens or I start crocheting or knitting a few stitches. Not always, but often it helps me to calm down, and I don't even do it to have something to show later.

It may start with a tube when I suddenly decide to fold it up and knit a disk around that suddenly gets folded up over the first layer, so I can add a second and third disk which I wire together, so I can put something inside or maybe not because instead I turn it into a bezel after all and put a stone in there or maybe a bead and you know this would look fun as a ring if I add another layer and then attach it to some thicker wire or maybe not?

I do know this is not good writing, but my brain doesn't take a break to think about grammar or punctuation when it is in that mood. It just keeps running and babbling and ticking which may be a good thing or leave me with a tangled mess of wire that looks like an experiment gone wrong. Well, which it actually is.
You can't always tell from the piece how many layers went into it, but it doesn't really matter, does it?
Only the result matters and sometimes it ends up in the trash.

Not this one.
I spent more time on this pendant than I would want to admit, but I do like how it turned out.

Available in my Zibbet shop

Who is this?

Honestly, I have no idea. She just happened. With that headdress on she looks like a queen from an old time or maybe a sorceress or a priestess.
One thing is for sure, she took her sweet time to look like this. I frogged, I bent, I folded, I added, I took away and all the time she stayed as tranquil as she is looking now.
I'm sorry for not having a better picture at this time of night, but I felt I needed to take one right away after I spent the whole evening with her ...

Arachnophilia

Guess what I found when I went into our little garden today! A bunch of very special spiders enjoying the spring sun, crawling around on flowers and bushes.

Ok, ok.
Although it would have been fun to discover a new species, I have to admit that these little crawlers are in fact my own creatures. Please imagine now how I throw my head back and break out into a mad scientist's laughter.
I had these tiny, just half an inch long carved face cabochons in my stash for more than two years. I took them out of their little bag, put them back, took them out, but I knew it wouldn't be easy to make a bezel for them without hiding any facial features.
This time I was game to try it in the wire knit technique and add some beads. When I had finished the first one, I suddenly had the idea to make a spider. After finishing the first spider then I couldn't stop myself anymore ... and now I want to make a whole army of spiders and take over the world, mwahahaaaaaa! ;-)

Where did that come from?

My plan was to take one of my small Mexican Cantera opals and make something with it. Instead I stumbled upon this beautiful glass cab - believe me, my pictures don't do it justice - and decided on a little quickie. Just a very simple wire knit setting, you know, no extras, no beads, no double layers, nothing.
Very funny. Sometimes I wonder if I know myself.

The pictures can't show what exactly I did. There are double layers in there which hold the freshwater pearls now and the bezel went up a few rows, too.
It makes me think that I should take WIP pictures from time to time, but it's hard to remember that if you are caught up in a project.

So just have a look at the beautiful colors. Unfortunately that cab was a gift and I don't know where it came from. I think some browsing may be in order eventually.

More colors (without the Queen this time) and a WIP

Yesterday I told you about my fondness for color variations of the same design.
Today I want to tell you about my love of color in general and chose tourmaline for it. A friend gave me a strand of tourmaline chips and as always I couldn't help being impressed by the many colors. At first look you might think it's just pink and green, but then you look closer and find this for example.

Can you see that not only there is green, blue, pink, yellow, but that two of the chips also show rainbow colors, one has a dark green and a light pink part and one is blue and pink? And this is not even a very good picture.

I fell in love with tourmalines' colors when I was a kid. We had a one volume encyclopedia with very few colored pages that we came back to again and again. The ones we loved most were the two with flags of the world, fish from the deep sea and minerals. These illustrations were no photos, but printed paintings. My favorites were the moon fish, the Kenyan flag and the tourmaline crystal which was half green, half pink which impressed me very much.
I wanted to take a picture of it for this post as I was sure I had bought the old encyclopedia for myself at a flea market, but now I seem to remember it fell apart so badly that it couldn't be repaired.

Instead I took a picture of a WIP, the wire knit rope necklace that I made with the rest of the tourmalines ....

.... and just for fun here's a close up of the "rainbow chip". So small and yet such wealth of colors!

Going crazy over wire knit

It's not new that I am addicted to knitting with wire. Of course I am just as addicted to wire crochet and bead looming, but a while ago I had to grab a little bag with cabochons and start experimenting with wire knit again.
The beginning is usually the same. I take my crochet hook and knit a bezel for a cabochon. I could just as well crochet one, but the knit stitches are easier to shape around cabs and more open which also makes it easier to add something to the bezel.


Let me show you the different variations I have come up with lately.

For this pendant I used a cab and tiny smoky quartz beads.

I started knitting onto the top row of the bezel using a little bead in each stitch for three rows, then I fixed this part to the bottom row of the bezel and added an extra row for safety.

That way I could open up the stitches around the quartz beads to make it look as if they are almost floating around the center.
It is available here.

This pendant is completely different. I called it pillow pendant because the setting feels like a pillow if you squish it. That is the result of three disks added to the cab's bezel. If you look close, you can see the one in the middle peeking through because it's a gunmetal color. By crocheting all of the disks together on top you get this bowl-like look with the cab sitting in the depths.
You can find it here.

In this case I also used tiny beads, seed beads this time. As you can tell they are worked right into the knit bezel, however, and there is more than one in each stitch which makes this a very tight looking bezel. I did that because I liked the contrast between the dark hematite rock and the bright wire and beads.
If you want to see more pictures, you can do so here.

I really had fun with this little piece. It was my second attempt to put two cabs into one setting and keep both of them there without one slipping or sliding.
A flat little black agate is sitting on top of a howlite cab. It's not glued or stuck on there, it's simply held by the tension of the bezel. I manipulated the stitches on the howlite to let it shine through better and make the setting more fun, but added a very tight row on top to keep the agate in place. I was really happy how well that worked out!
The pendant is in my Zibbet shop now.

Last but not least I have one my own favorite pieces to show.
This is a beautiful stone and I wanted to give it a simple yet bold setting. What do you say, did it work?
You can find this pendant here.

Ok, that was a lot, thank you for your patience! Isn't it fascinating, though, how much you can do just with a bit of wire and a crochet hook?
And if you thought that was much just wait for next time when I will talk about the HeatherCats again ;-)

A Happy New Year!

I don't know what the new year will bring for me and also for all of you. I am crossing my fingers and the cats' paws for 2014 to be a good year for all of us. Healthy, peaceful, creative ... let's be helpful to others, open-minded and don't forget to be good to yourselves.

I'm quite sure there will be headdesks, though. I practically ended the year with them, and I'll tell you why.
Earrings. I like them. A lot. Dangly ones mostly. I like to wear them and I like to make them. That's not completely true. There have been many times when I loved earring #1 and went crazy over #2, and not crazy in a good way, from excitement how wonderful it was. Because sometimes #2 just doesn't want to be wonderful, but does everything to make me hit my head on my desk.

Cabs can only be so small to be used if you crochet or knit with wire. They need to be safe in their bezel which means you can't make it too loose, but you don't want to cover all of them with wire, either.
Sometimes I challenge myself to see what I can do. I grab out the 1.4 mm crochet hook (I broke the 1.3 mm one, shame on me or rather the wire) and go to work. For smaller or narrower cabs I found wire knitting to work better than crochet as the structure is more open, so the wire doesn't take over, also it is easier because your wire "mesh" is more flexible.
I started knitting a bezel for this aventurine. The hard part is to knit high enough, but not too high, and then to hold your small cab in that bezel while closing it up with the last row. More than once a cab decided on a last second jump to freedom. This one was quite cooperative. Being on a wire and pearl path at the moment I added some pearls all around, and I was really happy with it.
Then came #2. It didn't like me from the start. First it refused to sit still in its bezel. Maybe it felt hurt because I was "watching" a documentary about the Hope diamond at the same time. There's not much that a little aventurine can hold against a diamond of that kind. We finally came to terms with each other regarding the bezel, but when it was time for the pearls to appear on the scene, suddenly the wire didn't want to play along anymore. Can you believe it broke three times until I decided we all needed a break until the next day? The (not so) funny thing is that I don't like to add wire in a piece like that which meant the cab spent its night in a bag with the other cabs, but in relative freedom after I took the bezel off again ... which was probably what it had planned all along.

A new day, a new attempt. This time we were all playing nicely, and so here the earrings are now, in my DaWanda shop. Phew! Maybe not a bad way after all to end the old year.

Lazy or not lazy ...

... that's the question.
Not lazy, I promise, even if my blog looks neglected except for the finds and the quotes. Okay, okay, it has been neglected, but I did have my reasons.
One of them is a fundraiser I am still doing for a friend of mine and her cats to help out with vet bills. It's the chance to get an original Cat's Wire piece at a great price and get some grateful cats' purrs on top.
You can check out what's still available in the "Perry and his pals" album on Facebook. If you are not on Facebook, but are still interested in a piece, you can write to cat@catswire.com and I'll be happy to tell you more. Some of the pieces were made just for this album.

I have also been working on two orders and I started putting rocks and pearls into handmade wire knit ropes like in these two pieces.
The long one is for me since the rocks were a gift, the other one was made for a JAC challenge that you will hear more about later this month.

The urge to put more things into the ropes is almost overwhelming, I can tell you! It will have to wait a bit longer, though. There is this still very secret project I am working on, one that I am very excited about.
I could really use more time, a few more arms and a huge chai supply!!