I made an octopus!

You may want to say that you already know that I made an octopus ... or two or five or ten ... after all I had shown a collage of them in 2019 in this long post. Of course I didn't stop making them after this, but the wire had been on the back burner for a while now because new techniques had to be explored which also happened to be easier on my hands than the wire most of the time.

That doesn't mean the wire has stopped calling me, though, so when I was asked to make a custom octopus pendant, I couldn't say no.
I love that none of them comes out the same. Tentacles with one or two wires, with beads or without beads, the head with a cab or without, and best of all - I never know myself what they will look like in the end. Making the tentacles go wild is really the most fun about this. It may seem they are random, but they are not.
The first one starts out randomly, but the next ones are based on it, and often I go back to fiddling on the first again, too.
I like to think the octopus head is telling me what to do ;-)

For this one, a cab was required and the choice was a lovely moss agate cab.
I used moss agate on a custom order before, only in that case the stone was large and dark green and not just the size requirements for the pendant were very specific, I also had to use exactly 23 moss agate beads in the two-wired tentacles which weren't supposed to spread out, all of which made the job a bit of a puzzle.

This time, I was allowed to go wild as long as I added enough moss agate beads to the tentacles and achieved a certain length, and I enjoyed it immensely.
So this is the latest addition to my little octopus family (and I'm already hatching new ideas in my head ;-)).

More tentacles

I love making tentacles, and this animal has been on my to-do list for some time, even before I started wire weaving. I had thought about crocheting one, knitting one, I started a pattern for a bead loomed one once, but no matter how much I made my brain cells work, nothing convincing came to mind, and the project got pushed back again and again.
It has been quite a while that I have been to the Wilhelma, but when I had visited, the common jellyfish in the aquarium have always been one of my favorite stops. I often wished I had a high chair to sit down and relax just by watching them floating in the water. It's almost hypnotizing, and I know others feel that way, too.

After working on my different octopuses, I finally decided now I'd just start by making the tentacles and maybe a good idea would come to me then. And it did!

Of course I knew that you can't recreate that special, almost ethereal look with wire. Wire and a cab are so much more solid ;-) Instead the shape was more important here. Not that all jellyfish look the same, but I think if you asked people to draw one, they would have pretty much the same features - a body like a turned over bowl and tentacles.
While I would usually oxidize the copper, however, I left it shiny this time to at least make the jellyfish not so dark.

I found just the right shape in my cabochon stash (yes, actually this is a stash tackler, but I didn't want to wait until Friday).
And the biggest fun about making tentacles is that they can all look different. Long or short, curved this way or that way, individual patterns (although there's not that much you can do with only two wires), and of course the loops that I love which you have already noticed, no doubt. I could hardly stop myself, but there was only so much space on the cab.

The chain that I added has irregularly sized links because I used the wire pieces that were left over from other projects and had different lengths, a nice way to use them at last.

I would like to say this won't be my last jellyfish because I loved working on it so much, but I know myself too well and my infamous list that changes all the time. On the other hand - tentacles!! :-D