2023-6-6: Wire wrapping
Ok ok I'll admit it up front, wire wrapping is not my strong suit. My focus has been cutting and polishing rocks, and in this episode, I'll show you my first attempts at doing some wraps which are not in a groove cut. This is a big step for me and an important one because groove cutting is a tricky business and I've had mixed luck with it. It also allows me to make use of many more of my cabochons, so let's see what happens. As my mentor Dave would say - Two in the hand is better than one in the bush. I keep telling him that's not quite right and doesn't make a lot of sense right now, but he insists! Let's get wrapping!
Unfortunately - I just realized I didn't take many "in progress" photos so you'll have to do with mostly final products. I'll do better next time, sorry Dave.
This is one of my beloved cabochons that turned out really good. If you look closely it has a picture of a dog wearing goggles! woof! But, as you can see, gluing a bail on the back wouldn't look quite right.
Problem solved. There were several donations to the swear jar during this process but i got a lot of advice from JasoninSD and I think it turned out pretty great for my first try!
Here it is after a quick dip in some liver of sulfur.
After that, I brushed off the excess to make a nice patina look, and here we are!
Next up is a little smaller one. I didn't take the before picture on this but here we are in the middle of it... What in the world am I going to do with all those wires...
Fast forward - this is it!
Finally, I just finished making some fantastic pieces of tigers eye with some yellow whispies that look like fire. Anyway, these were took good to sit around so I decided to try out another wrap, but this will be an Agate Whisperer first. I'm going to try breaking out the fru fru swirls with some "fru fu"!
This is the back. Now time for the fru
I must admit, this was much harder than I thought it'd be. My family will likely be going on an all expenses paid vacation to the Bahamas with the swear jar money on this one. But, at the end of the day, I learned a lot and it turned out looking pretty good!
This is the back view. Kinda cool. I'm going to try a couple more and then try to do some patina on the copper so it's not so... coppery.
I showed this to my mentor Dave and he gave me his honest opinion...
